IE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY  NEW  YORK  MCMXVJ 


REVERIES  OVER  CHILDHOOD 
AND  YOUTH 


THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

NEW  YORK    •    BOSTON   ■    CHICAGO  -    DALLAS 
ATLANTA   •    SAN    FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN  &   CO.,  Limited 

LONDON  •    BOMBAY   •    CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE  MACMILLAN  CO.  OF  CANADA,  Ltd. 

TORONTO 


BY  V 


The  picture  "  Memory  Harbour  "  is  the  village  of  Rosses  Point,  but 
with  the  distances  shortened  and  the  houses  run  together  as  in  an  old- 
fashioned  panoramic  map.  The  man  on  the  pedestal  in  the  middle  of 
the  river  is  "  the  metal  man,"  and  he  points  to  where  the  water  is  deep 
enough  for  ships.  The  coffin,  crossbones,  skull,  and  loaf  at  the  point 
of  the  headland  are  to  remind  one  of  the  sailor  who  was  buried  there 
by  a  ship's  crew  in  a  hurry  not  to  miss  the  tide.  As  they  were  not  sure 
if  he  was  really  dead  they  buried  with  him  a  loaf,  as  the  story  runs. 

W.  B.  Y. 


lo  jibbirn  ^dt  ni  IsJe^boq  3rij  no  nam  srfT     .qaoi  jifneionsq  banoiflae- 

373r{1  b^itud  3&W  orivv  toli^e  jrfi  >o  auo  famm'si  oi  3ie  bneibe^tl  art:}  lo 

Mvr  baiitjc' 


REVERIES    OVER    CHILDHOOD    AND 
YOUTH  BY  WILLIAM  BUTLER  YEATS 


THE   MACMILLAN    COMPANY 
NEW  YORK  MCMXVI 


C  iPYKIGHT,    1916, 

By  the  MACMILLAN   COMPANY. 
Set  up  and  electrotyped.     Published  March,  1916. 


NcrfaooU  IPttss 

J.  8.  Gushing  Co.  —  Berwick  <fe  Smith  Co. 

Norwood,  Mass.,  U.S.A. 


To  those  few  people  mainly  personal  friends  who 
have  read  all  that  I  have  written. 

W.  B.  Y. 


PREFACE 

Sometimes  when  I  remember  a  relative  that  I 
have  been  fond  of,  or  a  strange  incident  of  the 
past,  I  wander  here  and  there  till  I  have  some- 
body to  talk  to.  Presently  I  notice  that  my  lis- 
tener is  bored  ;  but  now  that  I  have  written  it  out, 
I  may  even  begin  to  forget  it  all.  In  any  case, 
because  one  can  always  close  a  book,  my  friend 
need  not  be  bored. 

I  have  changed  nothing  to  my  knowledge,  and  yet 
it  must  be  that  I  have  changed  many  things  with- 
out my  knowledge,  for  I  am  writing  after  so  many 
years,  and  have  consulted  neither  friend  nor  letter 
nor  old  newspaper  and  describe  what  comes  often- 
est  into  my  memory. 

I  say  this  fearing  that  some  surviving  friend  of 
my  youth  may  remember  something  in  a  different 
shape  and  be  offended  with  my  book. 

Christmas  Day,  1914. 


vu 


REVERIES  OVER  CHILDHOOD  AND 
YOUTH 

Y  first  memories  are  fragmentary 
and  isolated  and  contemporaneous, 
as  though  one  remembered  vaguely 
some  early  day  of  the  Seven  Days. 
It  seems  as  if  time  had  not  yet  been 
created,  for  all  are  connected  with  emotion  and 
place  and  without  sequence. 

I  remember  sitting  upon  somebody's  knee,  looking 
out  of  a  window  at  a  wall  covered  with  cracked  and 
falling  plaster,  but  what  wall  I  do  not  remember, 
and  being  told  that  some  relation  once  lived  there. 
I  am  looking  out  of  another  window  in  London.  It 
is  at  Fitzroy  Road.  Some  boys  are  playing  in  the 
road  and  among  them  a  boy  in  uniform,  a  telegraph 
boy  perhaps.  When  I  ask  who  the  boy  is,  a  servant 
tells  me  that  he  is  going  to  blow  the  town  up,  and  I 
go  to  sleep  in  terror. 

After  that  come  memories  of  Sligo,  where  I  live 
with  my  grandparents.  I  am  sitting  on  the  ground 
looking  at  a  mastless  toy  boat,  with  the  paint  rubbed 
and  scratched,  and  I  say  to  myself  in  great  melan- 
choly, "it  is  further  away  than  it  used  to  be,"  and 
while  I  am  saying  it  I  am  looking  at  a  long  scratch 
in  the  stern,  for  it  is  especially  the  scratch  which  is 


further  away.  Then  one  day  at  dinner  my  great- 
uncle  WilHam  Middleton  says,  "we  should  not 
make  light  of  the  troubles  of  children.  They  are 
worse  than  ours,  because  we  can  see  the  end  of  our 
trouble  and  they  can  never  see  any  end,"  and  I  feel 
grateful  for  I  know  that  I  am  very  unhappy  and 
have  often  said  to  myself,  "when  you  grow  up, 
never  talk  as  grown-up  people  do  of  the  happiness 
of  childhood."  I  may  have  already  had  the  night  of 
misery  when,  having  prayed  for  several  days  that  I 
might  die,  I  had  begun  to  be  afraid  that  I  was  dying 
and  prayed  that  I  might  live.  There  was  no  reason 
for  my  unhappiness.  Nobody  was  unkind,  and  my 
grandmother  has  still  after  so  many  years  my  grati- 
tude and  my  reverence.  The  house  was  so  big 
that  there  was  always  a  room  to  hide  in,  and  I  had 
a  red  pony  and  a  garden  where  I  could  wander,  and 
there  were  two  dogs  to  follow  at  my  heels,  one  white 
with  some  black  spots  on  his  head  and  the  other 
with  long  black  hair  all  over  him.  I  used  to  think 
about  God  and  fancy  that  I  was  very  wicked,  and 
one  day  when  I  threw  a  stone  and  hit  a  duck  in  the 
yard  by  mischance  and  broke  its  wing,  I  was  full  of 
wonder  when  I  was  told  that  the  duck  would  be 
cooked  for  dinner  and  that  I  should  not  be  pun- 
ished. 

Some  of  my  misery  was  loneliness  and  some  of  it 

2 


fear  of  old  William  Pollexfen  my  grandfather.  He 
was  never  unkind,  and  I  cannot  remember  that  he 
ever  spoke  harshly  to  me,  but  it  was  the  custom  to 
fear  and  admire  him.  He  had  won  the  freedom  of 
some  Spanish  city  for  saving  life,  but  was  so  silent 
that  his  wife  never  knew  it  till  he  was  near  eighty, 
and  then  from  the  chance  visit  of  some  old  sailor. 
She  asked  him  if  it  was  true  and  he  said  it  was  true, 
but  she  knew  him  too  well  to  question  and  his  old 
shipmate  had  left  the  town.  She  too  had  the  habit 
of  fear.  We  knew  that  he  had  been  in  many  parts 
of  the  world,  for  there  was  a  great  scar  on  his  hand 
made  by  a  whaling-hook,  and  in  the  dining-room 
was  a  cabinet  with  bits  of  coral  in  it  and  a  jar  of 
water  from  the  Jordan  for  the  baptising  of  his  chil- 
dren and  Chinese  pictures  upon  rice-paper  and  an 
ivory  walking-stick  from  India  that  came  to  me 
after  his  death.  He  had  great  physical  strength  and 
had  the  reputation  of  never  ordering  a  man  to  do 
anything  he  would  not  do  himself.  He  owned  many 
sailing  ships  and  once,  when  a  captain  just  come  to 
anchor  at  Rosses  Point  reported  something  wrong 
with  the  rudder,  had  sent  a  messenger  to  say  "send 
a  man  down  to  find  out  what's  wrong."  "The  crew 
all  refuse"  was  the  answer.  "Go  down  yourself" 
was  my  grandfather's  order,  and  when  that  was  not 
obeyed,  he  dived  from  the  main  deck,  all  the  neigh- 

3 


bourhood  lined  along  the  pebbles  of  the  shore.  He 
came  up  with  his  skin  torn  but  well  informed  about 
the  rudder.  He  had  a  violent  temper  and  kept  a 
hatchet  at  his  bedside  for  burglars  and  would  knock 
a  man  down  instead  of  going  to  law,  and  I  once  saw 
him  hunt  a  group  of  men  with  a  horsewhip.  He 
had  no  relation  for  he  was  an  only  child,  and  being 
solitary  and  silent,  he  had  few  friends.  He  corre- 
sponded with  Campbell  of  Islay  who  had  befriended 
him  and  his  crew  after  a  shipwreck,  and  Captain 
Webb,  the  first  man  who  had  swum  the  Channel 
and  who  was  drowned  swimming  the  Niagara 
Rapids,  had  been  a  mate  in  his  employ  and  became 
a  close  friend.  That  is  all  the  friends  I  can  remem- 
ber and  yet  he  was  so  looked  up  to  and  admired 
that  when  he  returned  from  taking  the  waters  at 
Bath  his  men  would  light  bonfires  along  the  railway 
line  for  miles,  while  his  partner  William  Middleton 
whose  father  after  the  great  famine  had  attended 
the  sick  for  weeks,  and  taken  cholera  from  a  man  he 
carried  in  his  arms  into  his  own  house  and  died  of  it, 
and  was  himself  civil  to  everybody  and  a  cleverer 
man  than  my  grandfather,  came  and  went  without 
notice.  I  think  I  confused  my  grandfather  with 
God,  for  I  remember  in  one  of  my  attacks  of  melan- 
choly praying  that  he  might  punish  me  for  my  sins, 
and  I  was  shocked  and  astonished  when  a  dar- 

4 


ing  little  girl  —  a  cousin  I  think  —  having  waited 
under  a  group  of  trees  in  the  avenue,  where  she 
knew  he  would  pass  near  four  o'clock  on  the  way  to 
his  dinner,  said  to  him,  "  if  I  were  you  and  you  were 
a  little  girl,  I  would  give  you  a  doll." 
Yet  for  all  my  admiration  and  alarm,  neither  I  nor 
anyone  else  thought  it  wrong  to  outwit  his  violence 
or  his  rigour  ;  and  his  lack  of  suspicion  and  a  certain 
helplessness  made  that  easy  while  it  stirred  our  af- 
fection. When  I  must  have  been  still  a  very  little 
boy,  seven  or  eight  years  old  perhaps,  an  uncle 
called  me  out  of  bed  one  night,  to  ride  the  five 
or  six  miles  to  Rosses  Point  to  borrow  a  railway- 
pass  from  a  cousin.  My  grandfather  had  one,  but 
thought  it  dishonest  to  let  another  use  it,  but  the 
cousin  was  not  so  particular.  I  was  let  out  through 
a  gate  that  opened  upon  a  little  lane  beside  the  gar- 
den away  from  ear-shot  of  the  house,  and  rode 
delighted  through  the  moonlight,  and  awoke  my 
cousin  in  the  small  hours  by  tapping  on  his  window 
with  a  whip.  I  was  home  again  by  two  or  three  in 
the  morning  and  found  the  coachman  waiting  in  the 
little  lane.  My  grandfather  would  not  have  thought 
such  an  adventure  possible,  for  every  night  at  eight 
he  believed  that  the  stable-yard  was  locked,  and  he 
knew  that  he  was  brought  the  key.  Some  servant 
had  once  got  into  trouble  at  night  and  so  he  had 

5 


arranged  that  they  should  all  be  locked  in.  He 
never  knew,  what  everybody  else  in  the  house  knew, 
that  for  all  the  ceremonious  bringing  of  the  key 
the  gate  was  never  locked. 

Even  to-day  when  I  read  " King  Lear"  his  image  is 
always  before  me  and  I  often  wonder  if  the  delight 
in  passionate  men  in  my  plays  and  in  my  poetry 
is  more  than  his  memory.  He  must  have  been  ig- 
norant, though  I  could  not  judge  him  in  my  child- 
hood, for  he  had  run  away  to  sea  when  a  boy,  *'  gone 
to  sea  through  the  hawse-hole"  as  he  phrased  it, 
and  I  can  but  remember  him  with  two  books  —  his 
Bible  and  Falconer's  "Shipwreck,"  a  little  green- 
covered  book  that  lay  always  upon  his  table  ;  he  be- 
longed to  some  younger  branch  of  an  old  Cornish 
family.  His  father  had  been  in  the  Army,  had  re- 
tired to  become  an  owner  of  sailing  ships,  and  an  en- 
graving of  some  old  family  place  my  grandfather 
thought  should  have  been  his  hung  next  a  painted 
coat  of  arms  in  the  little  back  parlour.  His  mother 
had  been  a  Wexford  woman,  and  there  was  a  tradi- 
tion that  his  family  had  been  linked  with  Ireland 
for  generations  and  once  had  their  share  in  the  old 
Spanish  trade  with  Galway.  He  had  a  good  deal 
of  pride  and  disliked  his  neighbours,  whereas  his 
wife,  a  Middleton,  was  gentle  and  patient  and  did 
many  charities  in  the  little  back  parlour  among 

6 


frieze  coats  and  shawled  heads,  and  every  night 
when  she  saw  him  asleep  went  the  round  of  the 
house  alone  with  a  candle  to  make  certain  there  was 
no  burglar  in  danger  of  the  hatchet.  She  was  a  true 
lover  of  her  garden  and  before  the  care  of  her  house 
had  grown  upon  her,  would  choose  some  favourite 
among  her  flowers  and  copy  it  upon  rice-paper.  I 
saw  some  of  her  handiwork  the  other  day  and  I 
wondered  at  the  delicacy  of  form  and  colour  and  at 
a  handling  that  may  have  needed  a  magnifying 
glass  it  was  so  minute.  I  can  remember  no  other 
pictures  but  the  Chinese  paintings,  and  some 
coloured  prints  of  battles  in  the  Crimea  upon  the 
wall  of  a  passage,  and  the  painting  of  a  ship  at 
the  passage  end  darkened  by  time. 
My  grown-up  uncles  and  aunts,  my  grandfather's 
many  sons  and  daughters,  came  and  went,  and  al- 
most all  they  said  or  did  has  faded  from  my  mem- 
ory, except  a  few  harsh  words  that  convince  me 
by  a  vividness  out  of  proportion  to  their  harshness 
that  all  were  habitually  kind  and  considerate.  The 
youngest  of  my  uncles  was  stout  and  humorous  and 
had  a  tongue  of  leather  over  the  keyhole  of  his 
door  to  keep  the  draught  out,  and  another  whose 
bedroom  was  at  the  end  of  a  long  stone  passage  had 
a  model  turret  ship  in  a  glass  case.  He  was  a  clever 
man  and  had  designed  the  Sligo  quays,  but  was  now 

7 


going  mad  and  inventing  a  vessel  of  war  that  could 
not  be  sunk,  his  pamphlet  explained,  because  of  a 
hull  of  solid  wood.  Only  six  months  ago  my  sister 
awoke  dreaming  that  she  held  a  wingless  sea-bird 
in  her  arms  and  presently  she  heard  that  he  had 
died  in  his  mad-house,  for  a  sea-bird  is  the  omen 
that  announces  the  death  or  danger  of  a  Pollexfen. 
An  uncle,  George  Pollexfen,  afterwards  astrologer 
and  mystic,  and  my  dear  friend,  came  but  seldom 
from  Ballina,  once  to  a  race  meeting  with  two  pos- 
tillions dressed  in  green ;  and  there  was  that 
younger  uncle  who  had  sent  me  for  the  railway- 
pass.  He  was  my  grandmother's  favourite,  and 
had,  the  servants  told  me,  been  sent  away  from 
school  for  taking  a  crowbar  to  a  bully. 
I  can  only  remember  my  grandmother  punishing 
me  once.  I  was  playing  in  the  kitchen  and  a  servant 
in  horseplay  pulled  my  shirt  out  of  my  trousers  in 
front  just  as  my  grandmother  came  in  and  I,  ac- 
cused of  I  knew  not  what  childish  indecency,  was 
given  my  dinner  in  a  room  by  myself.  But  I  was  al- 
ways afraid  of  my  uncles  and  aunts,  and  once  the 
uncle  who  had  taken  the  crowbar  to  the  bully  found 
me  eating  lunch  which  my  grandmother  had  given 
me  and  reproved  me  for  it  and  made  me  ashamed. 
We  breakfasted  at  nine  and  dined  at  four  and  it  was 
considered  self-indulgent  to  eat  anything  between 

8 


meals  ;  and  once  an  aunt  told  me  that  I  had  reined 
in  my  pony  and  struck  it  at  the  same  moment 
that  I  might  show  it  off  as  I  rode  through  the  town, 
and  I,  because  I  had  been  accused  of  what  I  thought 
a  very  dark  crime,  had  a  night  of  misery.  Indeed  I 
remember  little  of  childhood  but  its  pain.  I  have 
grown  happier  with  every  year  of  life  as  though 
gradually  conquering  something  in  myself,  for  cer- 
tainly my  miseries  were  not  made  by  others  but 
were  a  part  of  my  own  mind. 

II 

One  day  someone  spoke  to  me  of  the  voice  of  the 
conscience,  and  as  I  brooded  over  the  phrase  I  came 
to  think  that  my  soul,  because  I  did  not  hear  an  ar- 
ticulate voice,  was  lost.  I  had  some  wretched  days 
until  being  alone  with  one  of  my  aunts  I  heard  a 
whisper  in  my  ear,  "what  a  tease  you  are  ! "  At  first 
I  thought  my  aunt  must  have  spoken,  but  when  I 
found  she  had  not,  I  concluded  it  was  the  voice  of 
my  conscience  and  was  happy  again.  From  that 
day  the  voice  has  come  to  me  at  moments  of  crisis, 
but  now  it  is  a  voice  in  my  head  that  is  sudden  and 
startling.  It  does  not  tell  me  what  to  do,  but  often 
reproves  me.  It  will  say  perhaps,  "that  is  unjust" 
of  some  thought ;  and  once  when  I  complained  that 
a  prayer  had  not  been  heard,  it  said,  "you  have 

9 


been  helped."  I  had  a  little  flagstaff  in  front  of  the 
house  and  a  red  flag  with  the  Union  Jack  in  the 
comer.  Every  night  I  pulled  my  flag  down  and 
folded  it  up  and  laid  it  on  a  shelf  in  my  bedroom, 
and  one  morning  before  breakfast  I  found  it, 
though  I  knew  I  had  folded  it  up  the  night  before, 
knotted  round  the  bottom  of  the  flagstaff"  so  that  it 
was  touching  the  grass.  I  must  have  heard  the  ser- 
vants talking  of  the  faeries  for  I  concluded  at  once 
that  a  faery  had  tied  those  four  knots  and  from  that 
on  believed  that  one  had  whispered  in  my  ear.  I 
have  been  told,  though  I  do  not  remember  it  my- 
self, that  I  saw,  whether  once  or  many  times  I  do 
not  know,  a  supernatural  bird  in  the  comer  of  the 
room.  Once  too  I  was  driving  with  my  grand- 
mother a  little  after  dark  close  to  the  Channel  that 
runs  for  some  five  miles  from  Sligo  to  the  sea,  and 
my  grandmother  showed  me  the  red  light  of  an  out- 
ward-bound steamer  and  told  me  that  my  grand- 
father was  on  board,  and  that  night  in  my  sleep  I 
screamed  out  and  described  the  steamer's  wreck. 
The  next  morning  my  grandfather  arrived  on  a 
blind  horse  found  for  him  by  grateful  passengers. 
He  had,  as  I  remember  the  story,  been  asleep  when 
the  captain  aroused  him  to  say  they  were  going  on 
the  rocks.  He  said,  ''have  you  tried  sail  on  her?" 
and  judging  from  some  answer  that  the  captain  was 

10 


demoralised  took  over  the  command  and,  when  the 
ship  could  not  be  saved,  got  the  crew  and  passengers 
into  the  boats.  His  own  boat  was  upset  and  he 
saved  himself  and  some  others  by  swimming  ;  some 
women  had  drifted  ashore,  buoyed  up  by  their 
crinolines.  "  I  was  not  so  much  afraid  of  the  sea  as 
of  that  terrible  man  with  his  oar,"  was  the  comment 
of  a  schoolmaster  who  was  among  the  survivors. 
Eight  men  were,  however,  drowned  and  my  grand- 
father suffered  from  that  memory  at  intervals  all 
his  life,  and  if  asked  to  read  family  prayers  never 
read  anything  but  the  shipwreck  of  St.  Paul. 
I  remember  the  dogs  more  clearly  than  anyone  ex- 
cept my  grandfather  and  grandmother.  The  black 
hairy  one  had  no  tail  because  it  had  been  sliced  off, 
if  I  was  told  the  truth,  by  a  railway  train.  I  think  I 
followed  at  their  heels  more  than  they  did  at  mine^ 
and  that  their  journeys  ended  at  a  rabbit-warren 
behind  the  garden  ;  and  sometimes  they  had  savage 
fights,  the  black  hairy  dog,  being  well  protected  by 
its  hair,  suffering  least.  I  can  remember  one  so  sav- 
age that  the  white  dog  would  not  take  his  teeth  out 
of  the  black  dog's  hair  till  the  coachman  hung  them 
over  the  side  of  a  water-butt,  one  outside  and  one  in 
the  water.  My  grandmother  once  told  the  coach- 
man to  cut  the  hair  like  a  lion's  hair  and,  after  a 
long  consultation  with  the  stable-boy,  he  cut  it  all 

11 


over  the  head  and  shoulders  and  left  it  on  the  lower 
part  of  the  body.  The  dog  disappeared  for  a  few 
days  and  I  did  not  doubt  that  its  heart  was  broken. 
There  was  a  large  garden  behind  the  house  full  of 
apple-trees  with  flower-beds  and  grass-plots  in 
the  centre  and  two  figure-heads  of  ships,  one  among 
the  strawberry  plants  under  a  wall  covered  with 
fruit  trees  and  one  among  the  flowers.  The  one 
among  the  flowers  was  a  white  lady  in  flowing  robes, 
while  the  other,  a  stalwart  man  in  uniform,  had 
been  taken  from  a  three-masted  ship  of  my  grand- 
father's called  "The  Russia,"  and  there  was  a 
belief  among  the  servants  that  the  stalwart  man 
represented  the  Tsar  and  had  been  presented  by  the 
Tsar  himself.  The  avenue,  or  as  they  say  in  Eng- 
land the  drive,  that  went  from  the  hall  door  through 
a  clump  of  big  trees  to  an  insignificant  gate  and  a 
road  bordered  by  broken  and  dirty  cottages,  was 
but  two  or  three  hundred  yards,  and  I  often 
thought  it  should  have  been  made  to  wind  more, 
for  I  judged  people's  social  importance  mainly 
by  the  length  of  their  avenues.  This  idea  may  have 
come  from  the  stable-boy,  for  he  was  my  principal 
friend.  He  had  a  book  of  Orange  rhymes,  and  the 
days  when  we  read  them  together  in  the  hay-loft 
gave  me  the  pleasure  of  rhyme  for  the  first  time. 
Later  on  I  can  remember  being  told,  when  there 

12 


was  a  rumour  of  a  Fenian  rising,  that  rifles  had  been 
served  out  to  the  Orangemen  and  presently,  when  I 
had  begun  to  dream  of  my  future  hfe,  I  thought  I 
would  like  to  die  fighting  the  Fenians.  I  was  to 
build  a  very  fast  and  beautiful  ship  and  to  have 
under  my  command  a  company  of  young  men  who 
were  always  to  be  in  training  like  athletes  and  so 
become  as  brave  and  handsome  as  the  young  men 
in  the  story-books,  and  there  was  to  be  a  big  bat- 
tle on  the  sea-shore  near  Rosses  and  I  was  to  be 
killed.  I  collected  little  pieces  of  wood  and  piled 
them  up  in  a  corner  of  the  yard,  and  there  was  an 
old  rotten  log  in  a  distant  field  I  often  went  to 
look  at  because  I  thought  it  would  go  a  long  way 
in  the  making  of  the  ship.  All  my  dreams  were  of 
ships ;  and  one  day  a  sea  captain  who  had  come 
to  dine  with  my  grandfather  put  a  hand  on  each 
side  of  my  head  and  lifted  me  up  to  show  me  Africa, 
and  another  day  a  sea  captain  pointed  to  the  smoke 
from  the  Pern  mill  on  the  quays  rising  up  beyond 
the  trees  of  the  lawn,  as  though  it  came  from  the 
mountain,  and  asked  me  if  Ben  Bulben  was  a 
burning  mountain. 

Once  every  few  months  I  used  to  go  to  Rosses  Point 
or  Ballisodare  to  see  another  little  boy,  who  had  a 
piebald  pony  that  had  once  been  in  a  circus  and 
sometimes  forgot  where  it  was  and  went  round 

13 


and  round.  He  was  George  Middleton,  son  of  my 
great-uncle  William  Middleton.  Old  Middleton  had 
bought  land,  then  believed  a  safe  investment,  at 
Ballisodare  and  at  Rosses,  and  spent  the  winter  at 
Ballisodare  and  the  summer  at  Rosses.  The  Middle- 
ton  and  Pollexfen  flour  mills  were  at  Ballisodare, 
and  a  great  salmon  weir,  rapids  and  a  waterfall,  but 
it  was  more  often  at  Rosses  that  I  saw  my  cousin. 
We  rowed  in  the  river  mouth  or  were  taken  sailing 
in  a  heavy  slow  schooner  yacht  or  in  a  big  ship's 
boat  that  had  been  rigged  and  decked.  There  were 
great  cellars  under  the  house,  for  it  had  been  a 
smuggler's  house  a  hundred  years  before,  and  some- 
times three  loud  raps  would  come  upon  the  drawing 
room  window  at  sun-down,  setting  all  the  dogs  bark- 
ing, some  dead  smuggler  giving  his  accustomed  sig- 
nal. One  night  I  heard  them  very  distinctly  and  my 
cousins  often  heard  them,  and  later  on  my  sister.  A 
pilot  had  told  me  that,  after  dreaming  three  times 
of  a  treasure  buried  in  my  uncle's  garden,  he  had 
climbed  the  wall  in  the  middle  of  the  night  and 
begun  to  dig  but  grew  disheartened  ''because there 
was  so  much  earth."  I  told  somebody  what  he  had 
said  and  was  told  that  it  was  well  he  did  not  find  it 
for  it  was  guarded  by  a  spirit  that  looked  like  a  flat 
K^.^  iron.  At  Ballisodare  there  was  a  cleft  among  the 
rocks  that  I  passed  with  terror  because  I  believed 

14 


that  a  murderous  monster  lived  there  that  made  a 
buzzing  sound  Hke  a  bee. 

It  was  through  the  Middletons  perhaps  that  I  got 
my  interest  in  country  stories  and  certainly  the 
first  faery  stories  that  I  heard  were  in  the  cottages 
about  their  houses.  The  Middletons  took  the  near- 
est for  friends  and  were  always  in  and  out  of  the 
cottages  of  pilots  and  of  tenants.  They  were  practi- 
cal, always  doing  something  with  their  hands,  mak- 
ing boats,  feeding  chickens,  and  without  ambition. 
One  of  them  had  designed  a  steamer  many  years 
before  my  birth  and  long  after  I  had  grown  to 
manhood  one  could  hear  it  —  it  had  some  sort  of 
obsolete  engine  —  many  miles  off  wheezing  in  the 
Channel  like  an  asthmatic  person.  It  had  been 
built  on  the  lake  and  dragged  through  the  town  by 
many  horses,  stopping  before  the  windows  where 
my  mother  was  learning  her  lessons,  and  plunging 
the  whole  school  into  candle-light  for  five  days,  and 
was  still  patched  and  repatched  mainly  because  it 
was  believed  to  be  a  bringer  of  good  luck.  It  had 
been  called  after  the  betrothed  of  its  builder 
** Janet,"  long  corrupted  into  the  more  familiar 
*' Jennet,"  and  the  betrothed  died  in  my  youth  hav- 
ing passed  her  eightieth  year  and  been  her  hus- 
band's plague  because  of  the  violence  of  her  temper. 
Another  who  was  but  a  year  or  two  older  than 

15 


myself  used  to  shock  me  by  running  after  hens  to 
know  by  their  feel  if  they  were  on  the  point  of  drop- 
ping an  egg.  They  let  their  houses  decay  and  the 
glass  fall  from  the  windows  of  their  greenhouses, 
but  one  among  them  at  any  rate  had  the  second 
sight.  They  were  liked  but  had  not  the  pride  and  re- 
serve, the  sense  of  decorum  and  order,  the  instinc- 
tive playing  before  themselves  that  belongs  to  those 
who  strike  the  popular  imagination. 
Sometimes  my  grandmother  would  bring  me  to  see 
some  old  Sligo  gentlewoman  whose  garden  ran 
down  to  the  river,  ending  there  in  a  low  wall  full  of 
wallflowers,  and  I  would  sit  up  upon  my  chair,  very 
bored,  while  my  elders  ate  their  seed-cake  and 
drank  their  sherry.  My  walks  with  the  servants 
were  more  interesting ;  sometimes  we  would  pass  a 
/  little  fat  girl  and  a  servant  persuaded  me  to  write 
-^  her  a  love-letter,  and  the  next  time  she  passed  she 
put  her  tongue  out.  But  it  was  the  servant's 
stories  that  interested  me.  At  such  and  such  a  cor- 
ner a  man  had  got  a  shilling  from  a  drill  sergeant 
by  standing  in  a  barrel  and  had  then  rolled  out 
of  it  and  shown  his  crippled  legs.  And  in  such  and 
such  a  house  an  old  woman  had  hid  herself  under 
the  bed  of  her  guests,  an  officer  and  his  wife,  and 
on  hearing  them  abuse  her,  beaten  them  with  a 
broomstick.  All  the  well-known  families  had  their 

16 


grotesque  or  tragic  or  romantic  legends,  and  I  often 
said  to  myself  how  terrible  it  would  be  to  go  away 
and  die  where  nobody  would  know  my  story.  Years 
afterwards,  when  I  was  ten  or  twelve  years  old  and 
in  London,  I  would  remember  Sligo  with  tears,  and 
when  I  began  to  write,  it  was  there  I  hoped  to  find 
my  audience.  Next  to  Merville  where  I  lived,  was 
another  tree-surrounded  house  where  I  sometimes 
went  to  see  a  little  boy  who  stayed  there  occasion- 
ally with  his  grandmother,  whose  name  I  forget  and 
who  seemed  to  me  kind  and  friendly,  though  when 
I  went  to  see  her  in  my  thirteenth  or  fourteenth 
year  I  discovered  that  she  only  cared  for  very  little 
boys.  When  the  visitors  called  I  hid  in  the  hay-loft 
and  lay  hidden  behind  the  great  heap  of  hay  while 
a  servant  was  calling  my  name  in  the  yard. 
I  do  not  know  how  old  I  was  (for  all  these  events 
seem  at  the  same  distance)  when  I  was  made  drunk.  i„^ 
I  had  been  out  yachting  with  an  uncle  and  my  cous- 
ins and  it  had  come  on  very  rough.  I  had  lain  on 
deck  between  the  mast  and  the  bowsprit  and  a 
wave  had  burst  over  me  and  I  had  seen  green  water 
over  my  head.  I  was  very  proud  and  very  wet. 
When  we  got  into  Rosses  again,  I  was  dressed  up 
in  an  older  boy's  clothes  so  that  the  trousers  came 
down  below  my  boots  and  a  pilot  gave  me  a  little 
raw  whiskey.  I  drove  home  with  the  uncle  on  an 

17 


outside  car  and  was  so  pleased  with  the  strange 
state  in  which  I  found  myself  that  for  all  my  uncle 
could  do,  I  cried  to  every  passer-by  that  I  was 
drunk,  and  went  on  crying  it  through  the  town  and 
everywhere  until  I  was  put  to  bed  by  my  grand- 
mother and  given  something  to  drink  that  tasted  of 
black  currants  and  so  fell  asleep. 

Ill 

Some  six  miles  off  towards  Ben  Bulben  and  beyond 
the  Channel,  as  we  call  the  tidal  river  between 
Sligo  and  the  Rosses,  and  on  top  of  a  hill  there  was 
a  little  square  two-storeyed  house  covered  with 
creepers  and  looking  out  upon  a  garden  where  the 
box  borders  were  larger  than  any  I  had  ever  seen, 
and  where  I  saw  for  the  first  time  the  crimson 
streak  of  the  gladiolus  and  awaited  its  blossom  with 
excitement.  Under  one  gable  a  dark  thicket  of 
small  trees  made  a  shut-in  mysterious  place,  where 
one  played  and  believed  that  something  was  going 
to  happen.  My  great-aunt  Micky  lived  there. 
Micky  was  not  her  right  name  for  she  was  Mary 
Yeats  and  her  father  had  been  my  great-grand- 
father, John  Yeats,  who  had  been  Rector  of  Drum- 
cliffe,  a  few  miles  further  off,  and  died  in  1847.  She 
was  a  spare,  high-coloured,  elderly  woman  and  had 
the  oldest  looking  cat  I  had  ever  seen,  for  its  hair 

18 


had  grown  into  matted  locks  of  yellowy  white. 
She  farmed  and  had  one  old  man-servant,  but  could 
not  have  farmed  at  all,  had  not  neighbouring 
farmers  helped  to  gather  in  the  crops,  in  return  for 
the  loan  of  her  farm  implements  and  "out  of  re- 
spect for  the  family,"  for  as  Johnny  MacGurk,  the 
Sligo  barber  said  to  me,  *'the  Yeats's  were  always 
very  respectable."  She  was  full  of  family  history  ; 
all  her  dinner  knives  were  pointed  like  daggers 
through  much  cleaning,  and  there  was  a  little 
James  the  First  cream-jug  with  the  Yeats  motto 
and  crest,  and  on  her  dining-room  mantle-piece  a 
beautiful  silver  cup  that  had  belonged  to  my  great- 
great-grandfather,  who  had  married  a  certain  Mary 
Butler.  It  had  upon  it  the  Butler  crest  and  had 
been  already  old  at  the  date  1534,  when  the  initials 
of  some  bride  and  bridegroom  were  engraved  under 
the  lip.  All  its  history  for  generations  was  rolled 
up  inside  it  upon  a  piece  of  paper  yellow  with  age, 
until  some  caller  took  the  paper  to  light  his  pipe. 
Another  family  of  Yeats,  a  widow  and  her  two 
children  on  whom  I  called  sometimes  with  my 
grandmother,  lived  near  in  a  long  low  cottage,  and 
owned  a  very  fierce  turkeycock  that  did  battle  with 
their  visitors  ;  and  some  miles  away  lived  the  secre- 
tary to  the  Grand  Jury  and  Land  Agent,  my  great- 
uncle  Mat  Yeats  and  his  big  family  of  boys  and 

19 


girls ;  but  I  think  it  was  only  in  later  years  that  I 
came  to  know  them  well.  I  do  not  think  any  of 
these  liked  the  Pollexfens,  who  were  well  off  and 
seemed  to  them  purse-proud,  whereas  they  them- 
selves had  come  down  in  the  world.  I  remember 
them  as  very  well-bred  and  very  religious  in  the 
Evangelical  way  and  thinking  a  good  deal  of  Aunt 
Micky's  old  histories.  There  had  been  among  our 
ancestors  a  Kings  County  soldier,  one  of  Marl- 
borough's generals,  and  when  his  nephew  came  to 
dine  he  gave  him  boiled  pork,  and  when  the  nephew 
said  he  disliked  boiled  pork  he  had  asked  him  to 
dine  again  and  promised  him  something  he  would 
like  better.  However,  he  gave  him  boiled  pork 
again  and  the  nephew  took  the  hint  in  silence. 
The  other  day  as  I  was  coming  home  from  America, 
I  met  one  of  his  descendants  whose  family  has  not 
another  discoverable  link  with  ours,  and  he  too 
knew  the  boiled  pork  story  and  nothing  else.  We 
have  the  General's  portrait,  and  he  looks  very  fine 
in  his  armour  and  his  long  curly  wig,  and  under- 
neath it,  after  his  name,  are  many  honours  that 
have  left  no  tradition  among  us.  Were  we  country 
people,  we  could  have  summarised  his  life  in  a 
legend. 

Another  ancestor  or  great-uncle  had  chased  the 
United  Irishmen  for  a  fortnight,  fallen  into  their 

20 


hands  and  been  hanged,  and  the  notorious  Major 
Sirr  who  betrayed  the  brothers  Shears,  taking  their 
children  upon  his  knees  to  question  them,  if  the  tale 
does  not  lie,  had  been  god-father  to  several  of  my 
great-great-grandfather's  children  ;  while  to  make 
a  balance,  my  great-grandfather  had  been  Robert 
Emmett's  friend  and  been  suspected  and  imprisoned 
though  but  for  a  few  hours.  A  great-uncle  had  been 
Governor  of  Penang,  and  led  the  forlorn  hope  at  the 
taking  of  Rangoon,  and  an  uncle  of  a  still  older  gen- 
eration had  fallen  at  New  Orleans  in  1813,  and  even 
in  the  last  generation  there  had  been  lives  of  some 
power  and  pleasure.  An  old  man  who  had  enter- 
tained many  famous  people,  in  his  18th  century 
house,  where  battlement  and  tower  showed  the  in- 
fluence of  Horace  Walpole,  had  but  lately,  after 
losing  all  his  money,  drowned  himself,  first  taking 
off  his  rings  and  chain  and  watch  as  became  a 
collector  of  many  beautiful  things ;  and  once  to 
remind  us  of  more  passionate  life,  a  gun-boat  put 
into  Rosses,  commanded  by  the  illegitimate  son  of 
some  great-uncle  or  other.  Now  that  I  can  look  at 
their  miniatures,  turning  them  over  to  find  the 
name  of  soldier,  or  lawyer,  or  Castle  official,  and 
wondering  if  they  cared  for  good  books  or  good 
music,  I  am  delighted  with  all  that  joins  my  life  to 
those  who  had  power  in  Ireland  or  with  those  any- 

21 


U^ 


where  that  were  good  servants  and  poor  bargainers, 
but  I  cared  nothing  as  a  child  for  Micky's  tales.  I 
could  see  my  grandfather's  ships  come  up  the  bay 
or  the  river,  and  his  sailors  treated  me  with  defer- 
ence, and  a  ship's  carpenter  made  and  mended  my 
toy  boats  and  I  thought  that  nobody  could  be  so 
important  as  my  grandfather.  Perhaps,  too,  it  is 
only  now  that  I  can  value  those  more  gentle  natures 
so  unlike  his  passion  and  violence.  An  old  Sligo 
priest  has  told  me  how  my  great-grandfather  John 
Yeats  always  went  into  his  kitchen  rattling  the 
keys,  so  much  did  he  fear  finding  some  one  doing 
wrong,  and  how  when  the  agent  of  the  great  land- 
owner of  his  parish  brought  him  from  cottage  to 
cottage  to  bid  the  women  send  their  children  to  the 
Protestant  school  and  all  had  promised  till  they 
came  to  one  who  cried,  ''child  of  mine  will  never 
darken  your  door,"  he  had  said  "thank  you,  my  wo- 
man, you  are  the  first  honest  woman  I  have  met  to- 
day." My  uncle,  Mat  Yeats,  the  Land  Agent,  had 
once  waited  up  every  night  for  a  week  to  catch  some 
boys  who  stole  his  apples  and  when  he  caught  them 
had  given  them  sixpence  and  told  them  not  to  do  it 
again.  Perhaps  it  is  only  fancy  or  the  softening 
touch  of  the  miniaturist  that  makes  me  discover  in 
their  faces  some  courtesy  and  much  gentleness. 
Two  18th  century  faces  interest  me  the  most,  one 

22 


that  of  a  great-great-grandfather,  for  both  have 
under  their  powdered  curHng  wigs  a  half-feminine 
charm,  and  as  I  look  at  them  I  discover  a  something 
clumsy  and  heavy  in  myself.  Yet  it  was  a  Yeats 
who  spoke  the  only  eulogy  that  turns  my  head. 
*'We  have  ideas  and  no  passions,  but  by  marriage 
with  a  Pollexfen  we  have  given  a  tongue  to  the  sea 
cliffs." 

Among  the  miniatures  there  is  a  larger  picture,  an 
admirable  drawing  by  I  know  not  what  master,  that 
is  too  harsh  and  merry  for  its  company.  He  was  a 
connection  and  close  friend  of  my  great-grand- 
mother Corbet,  and  though  we  spoke  of  him  as 
*' Uncle  Beattie"  in  our  childhood,  no  blood  rela- 
tion. My  great-grandmother  who  died  at  ninety- 
three  had  many  memories  of  him.  He  was  the 
friend  of  Goldsmith  &  was  accustomed  to  boast, 
clergyman  though  he  was,  that  he  belonged  to  a 
hunt-club  of  which  every  member  but  himself  had 
been  hanged  or  transported  for  treason,  and  that 
it  was  not  possible  to  ask  him  a  question  he  could 
not  reply  to  with  a  perfectly  appropriate  blas- 
phemy or  indecency. 

IV  / 

Because  I  had  found  it  hard  to  attend  to  anything 
less  interesting  than  my  thoughts,  I  was  difficult  to 

23 


t  J- 


teach.  Several  of  my  uncles  and  aunts  had  tried  to 
teach  me  to  read,  and  because  they  could  not,  and 
because  I  was  much  older  than  children  who  read 
easily,  had  come  to  think,  as  I  have  learnt  since, 
that  I  had  not  all  my  faculties.  But  for  an  accident 
they  might  have  thought  it  for  a  long  time.  My 
father  was  staying  in  the  house  and  never  went  to 
church,  and  that  gave  me  the  courage  to  refuse  to 
set  out  one  Sunday  morning.  I  was  often  devout, 
my  eyes  filling  with  tears  at  the  thought  of  God  and 
of  my  own  sins,  but  I  hated  church.  My  grand- 
mother tried  to  teach  me  to  put  my  toes  first  to  the 
ground  because  I  suppose  I  stumped  on  my  heels 
and  that  took  my  pleasure  out  of  the  way  there. 
Later  on  when  I  had  learnt  to  read  I  took  pleasure 
in  the  words  of  the  hymn,  but  never  understood 
why  the  choir  took  three  times  as  long  as  I  did  in 
getting  to  the  end ;  and  the  part  of  the  service  I 
liked,  the  sermon  and  passages  of  the  Apocalypse 
and  Ecclesiastes,  were  no  compensation  for  all  the 
repetitions  and  for  the  fatigue  of  so  much  standing. 
My  father  said  if  I  would  not  go  to  church  he  would 
teach  me  to  read.  I  think  now  that  he  wanted  to 
make  me  go  for  my  grandmother's  sake  and  could 
think  of  no  other  way.  He  was  an  angry  and  im- 
patient teacher  and  flung  the  reading  book  at  my 
head,  and  next  Sunday  I  decided  to  go  to  church. 

24 


My  father  had,  however,  got  interested  in  teaching 
me,  and  only  shifted  the  lesson  to  a  week-day  till  he 
had  conquered  my  wandering  mind.  My  first  clear 
image  of  him  was  fixed  on  my  imagination,  I  be- 
lieve, but  a  few  days  before  the  first  lesson.  He  had 
just  arrived  from  London  and  was  walking  up  and 
down  the  nursery  floor.  He  had  a  very  black  beard 
and  hair,  and  one  cheek  bulged  out  with  a  fig  that 
was  there  to  draw  the  pain  out  of  a  bad  tooth.  One 
of  the  nurses  (a  nurse  had  come  from  London  with 
my  brothers  and  sisters)  said  to  the  other  that  a 
live  frog,  she  had  heard,  was  best  of  all.  Then  I  was 
sent  to  a  dame  school  kept  by  an  old  woman  who 
stood  us  in  rows  and  had  a  long  stick  like  a  billiard 
cue  to  get  at  the  back  rows.  My  father  was  still 
at  Sligo  when  I  came  back  from  my  first  lesson  and 
asked  me  what  I  had  been  taught.  I  said  I  had 
been  taught  to  sing,  and  he  said,  "sing  then"  and  I 
sang 

*' Little  drops  of  water, 
Little  grains  of  sand, 
Make  the  mighty  ocean, 
And  the  pleasant  land  " 

high  up  in  my  head.  So  my  father  wrote  to  the  old 
woman  that  I  was  never  to  be  taught  to  sing  again, 
and  afterwards  other  teachers  were  told  the  same 

25 


thing.  Presently  my  eldest  sister  came  on  a  long 
visit  and  she  and  I  went  to  a  little  two-storeyed 
house  in  a  poor  street  where  an  old  gentlewoman 
taught  us  spelling  and  grammar.  When  we  had 
learned  our  lesson  well,  we  were  allowed  to  look  at 
a  sword  presented  to  her  father  who  had  led  troops 
in  India  or  China  and  to  spell  out  a  long  compli- 
mentary inscription  on  the  silver  scabbard.  As  we 
walked  to  her  house  or  home  again  we  held  a  large 
umbrella  before  us,  both  gripping  the  handle  and 
guiding  ourselves  by  looking  out  of  a  round  hole 
gnawed  in  the  cover  by  a  mouse.  When  I  had  got 
beyond  books  of  one  syllable,  I  began  to  spend  my 
time  in  a  room  called  the  Library,  though  there 
were  no  books  in  it  that  I  can  remember  except 
some  old  novels  I  never  opened  and  a  many 
volumed  encyclopaedia  published  towards  the  end 
of  the  18th  century.  I  read  this  encyclopaedia  a 
great  deal  and  can  remember  a  long  passage  con- 
sidering whether  fossil  wood  despite  its  appearance 
might  not  be  only  a  curiously  shaped  stone. 
My  father's  unbelief  had  set  me  thinking  about  the 
evidences  of  religion  and  I  weighed  the  matter  per- 
petually with  great  anxiety,  for  I  did  not  think 
I  could  live  without  religion.  All  my  religious 
emotions  were,  I  think,  connected  with  clouds  and 
cloudy  glimpses  of  luminous  sky,  perhaps  because 

26 


of  some  bible  picture  of  God's  speaking  to  Abraham 
or  the  Hke.  At  least  I  can  remember  the  sight  mov- 
ing me  to  tears.  One  day  I  got  a  decisive  argument 
for  belief.  A  cow  was  about  to  calve,  and  I  went  to 
the  field  where  the  cow  was  with  some  farm-hands 
who  carried  a  lantern,  and  next  day  I  heard  that  the 
cow  had  calved  in  the  early  morning.  I  asked  every- 
body how  calves  were  born,  and  because  nobody 
would  tell  me,  made  up  my  mind  that  nobody  knew. 
They  were  the  gift  of  God,  that  much  was  certain, 
but  it  was  plain  that  nobody  had  ever  dared  to  see 
them  come,  and  children  must  come  in  the  same 
way.  I  made  up  my  mind  that  when  I  was  a  man 
I  would  wait  up  till  calf  or  child  had  come.  I  was 
certain  there  would  be  a  cloud  and  a  burst  of  light 
and  God  would  bring  the  calf  in  the  cloud  out  of  the 
light.  That  thought  made  me  content  until  a  boy 
of  twelve  or  thirteen,  who  had  come  on  a  visit  for 
the  day,  sat  beside  me  in  a  hay-loft  and  explained 
all  the  mechanism  of  sex.  He  had  learnt  all  about  it 
from  an  elder  boy  whose  pathic  he  was  (to  use  a 
term  he  would  not  have  understood)  and  his  de- 
scription, given,  as  I  can  see  now,  as  if  he  were  telling 
of  any  other  fact  of  physical  life,  made  me  miserable 
for  weeks.  After  the  first  impression  wore  off,  I  be- 
gan to  doubt  if  he  had  spoken  truth,  but  one  day  I 
discovered  a  passage  in  the  encyclopaedia,  though  I 

27 


only  partly  understood  its  long  words,  that  con- 
firmed what  he  had  said.  I  did  not  know  enough  to 
be  shocked  at  his  relation  to  the  elder  boy,  but  it 
was  the  first  breaking  of  the  dream  of  childhood. 
My  realization  of  death  came  when  my  father  and 
mother  and  my  two  brothers  and  my  two  sisters 
were  on  a  visit.  I  was  in  the  Library  when  I  heard 
feet  running  past  and  heard  somebody  say  in  the 
passage  that  my  younger  brother,  Robert,  had  died. 
He  had  been  ill  for  some  days.  A  little  later  my 
sister  and  I  sat  at  the  table,  very  happy,  drawing 
ships  with  their  flags  half-mast  high.  We  must  have 
heard  or  seen  that  the  ships  in  the  harbour  had  their 
flags  at  half-mast.  Next  day  at  breakfast  I  heard 
people  telling  how  my  mother  and  the  servant  had 
heard  the  banshee  crying  the  night  before  he  died. 
It  must  have  been  after  this  that  I  told  my  grand- 
mother I  did  not  want  to  go  with  her  when  she  went 
to  see  old  bed-ridden  people  because  they  would 
soon  die. 

V 

At  length  when  I  was  eight  or  nine  an  aunt  said  to 
me,  "you  are  going  to  London.  Here  you  are  some- 
body. There  you  will  be  nobody  at  all."  I  knew  at 
the  time  that  her  words  were  a  blow  at  my  father, 
not  at  me,  but  it  was  some  years  before  I  knew  her 
reason.  She  thought  so  able  a  man  as  my  father 

28 


could  have  found  out  some  way  of  painting  more 
popular  pictures  if  he  had  set  his  mind  to  it  and  that 
it  was  wrong  of  him  "to  spend  every  evening  at  his 
club."  She  had  mistaken,  for  what  she  would  have 
considered  a  place  of  wantonness,  Heatherley's  Art 
School. 

My  mother  and  brother  and  sister  were  at  Sligo 
perhaps  when  I  was  sent  to  England,  for  my  father 
and  I  and  a  group  of  landscape  painters  lodged  at 
Bumham  Beeches  with  an  old  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Earle. 
My  father  was  painting  the  first  big  pond  you  come 
to  if  you  have  driven  from  Slough  through  Farn- 
ham  Royal.  He  began  it  in  spring  and  painted  all 
through  the  year,  the  picture  changing  with  the 
seasons,  and  gave  it  up  unfinished  when  he  had 
painted  the  snow  upon  the  heath-covered  banks. 
He  is  never  satisfied  and  can  never  make  himself 
say  that  any  picture  is  finished.  In  the  evening  he 
heard  me  my  lessons  or  read  me  some  novel  of  Feni- 
more  Cooper's.  I  found  delightful  adventures  in 
the  woods  —  one  day  a  blind  worm  and  an  adder 
fighting  in  a  green  hollow,  and  sometimes  Mrs. 
Earle  would  be  afraid  to  tidy  the  room  because  I 
had  put  a  bottle  full  of  newts  on  the  mantle-piece. 
Now  and  then  a  boy  from  a  farm  on  the  other  side 
of  the  road  threw  a  pebble  at  my  window  at  day- 
break, and  he  and  I  went  fishing  in  the  big  second 

29 


pond.  Now  and  then  another  farmer's  boy  and  I 
shot  sparrows  with  an  old  pepper  box  revolver  and 
the  boy  would  roast  them  on  a  string.  There  was 
an  old  horse  one  of  the  painters  called  the  scaffold- 
ing, and  sometimes  a  son  of  old  Earle's  drove  with 
me  to  Slough  and  once  to  Windsor,  and  at  Windsor 
we  made  our  lunch  of  cold  sausages  bought  from  a 
public  house.  I  did  not  know  what  it  was  to  be 
alone,  for  I  could  wander  in  pleasant  alarm  through 
the  enclosed  parts,  then  very  large,  or  round  some 
pond  imagining  ships  going  in  and  out  among  the 
reeds  and  thinking  of  Sligo  or  of  strange  seafaring 
adventures  in  the  fine  ship  I  should  launch  when  I 
grew  up.  I  had  always  a  lesson  to  learn  before  night 
and  that  was  a  continual  misery,  for  I  could  very 
rarely,  with  so  much  to  remember,  set  my  thoughts 
upon  it  and  then  only  in  fear.  One  day  my  father 
told  me  that  a  painter  had  said  I  was  very  thick- 
skinned  and  did  not  mind  what  was  said  to  me,  and 
I  could  not  understand  how  anybody  could  be  so 
unjust.  It  made  me  wretched  to  be  idle  but  one 
could  not  help  it.  I  was  once  surprised  and  shocked. 
All  but  my  father  and  myself  had  been  to  London, 
and  Kennedy  and  Farrar  and  Page,  I  remember  the 
names  vaguely,  arrived  laughing  and  talking.  One 
of  them  had  carried  off  a  card  of  texts  from  the 
waiting  room  of  the  station  and  hung  it  up  on  the 

30 


wall.  I  thought  *'he  has  stolen  it,"  but  my  father 
and  all  made  it  a  theme  of  merry  conversation. 
Then  I  returned  to  Sligo  for  a  few  weeks  as  I  was  to 
do  once  or  twice  in  every  year  for  years,  and  after 
that  we  settled  in  London.  Perhaps  my  mother  and 
the  other  children  had  been  there  all  the  time,  for  I 
remember  my  father  now  and  again  going  to  Lon- 
don. The  first  house  we  lived  in  was  close  to  Bume 
Jones's  house  at  North  End,  but  we  moved  after  a 
year  or  two  to  Bedford  Park.  At  North  End  we  had 
a  pear  tree  in  the  garden  and  plenty  of  pears,  but 
the  pears  used  to  be  full  of  maggots,  and  almost  op- 
posite lived  a  school-master  called  O'Neill,  and 
when  a  little  boy  told  me  that  the  school-master's 
great-grandfather  had  been  a  king  I  did  not  doubt  it. 
I  was  sitting  against  the  hedge  and  iron  railing  of 
some  villa-garden  there,  when  I  heard  one  boy  say 
to  another  it  was  something  wrong  with  my  liver 
that  gave  me  such  a  dark  complexion  and  that  I 
could  not  live  more  than  a  year.  I  said  to  myself 'a 
year  is  a  very  long  time,  one  can  do  such  a  lot  of 
things  in  a  year,  and  put  it  out  of  my  head.  When 
my  father  gave  me  a  holiday  and  later  when  I  had 
a  holiday  from  school  I  took  my  schooner  boat  to 
the  round  pond,  sailing  it  very  commonly  against 
the  two  cutter  yachts  of  an  old  naval  officer.  He 
would  sometimes  look  at  the  ducks  and  say,  **I 

31 


would  like  to  take  that  fellow  home  for  my  dinner," 
and  he  sang  me  a  sailor's  song  about  a  coffin  ship 
which  left  Sligo  after  the  great  famine,  that  made 
me  feel  very  important.  The  servants  at  Sligo  had 
told  me  the  story.  When  she  was  moved  from  the 
berth  she  had  lain  in,  an  unknown  dead  man's  body 
had  floated  up,  a  very  evil  omen ;  and  my  grand- 
father, who  was  Lloyds'  agent,  had  condemned  her, 
but  she  slipped  out  in  the  night.  The  pond  had  its 
own  legends ;  and  a  boy  who  had  seen  a  certain 
model  steamer  "burned  to  the  water's  edge"  was 
greatly  valued  as  a  friend.  There  was  a  little  boy  I 
was  kind  to  because  I  knew  his  father  had  done 
something  disgraceful,  though  I  did  not  know  what. 
It  was  years  before  I  discovered  that  his  father  was 
but  the  maker  of  certain  popular  statues,  many  of 
which  are  now  in  public  places.  I  had  heard  my 
father's  friends  speak  of  him.  Sometimes  my  sister 
came  with  me,  and  we  would  look  into  all  the  sweet 
shops  &  toy  shops  on  our  way  home,  especially  into 
one  opposite  Holland  House  because  there  was  a 
cutter  yacht  made  of  sugar  in  the  window,  and  we 
drank  at  all  the  fountains.  Once  a  stranger  spoke  to 
us  and  bought  us  sweets  and  came  with  us  almost  to 
our  door.  We  asked  him  to  come  in  and  told  him 
our  father's  name.  He  would  not  come  in,  but 
laughed  and  said,  "Oh,  that  is  the  painter  who 

32 


s. 


ti 


■^ 


„*.ar- 


Vlv 


m^ 


"^i^a  n\    (I    /■/  rn  If  I  n  n   hii     j.  .1).   I    rni.i    ni  n  a  r    in    I  867 


scrapes  out  every  day  what  he  painted  the  day  be-  >^ 
fore."  A  poignant  memory  came  upon  me  the  other 
day  while  I  was  passing  the  drinking-fountain  near 
Holland  Park,  for  there  I  and  my  sister  had  spoken 
together  of  our  longing  for  Sligo  and  our  hatred  of 
London.  I  know  we  were  both  very  close  to  tears 
and  remember  with  wonder,  for  I  had  never  known 
anyone  that  cared  for  such  momentoes,  that  I 
longed  for  a  sod  of  earth  from  some  field  I  knew, 
something  of  Sligo  to  hold  in  my  hand.  It  was  some 
old  race  instinct  like  that  of  a  savage,  for  we  had 
been  brought  up  to  laugh  at  all  display  of  emotion. 
Yet  it  was  our  mother,  who  would  have  thought  its 
display  a  vulgarity,  who  kept  alive  that  love.  She 
would  spend  hours  listening  to  stories  or  telling 
stories  of  the  pilots  and  fishing  people  of  Rosses 
Point,  or  of  her  own  Sligo  girlhood,  and  it  was  al- 
ways assumed  between  her  and  us  that  Sligo  was 
more  beautiful  than  other  places.  I  can  see  now  that 
she  had  great  depth  of  feeling,  that  she  was  her 
father's  daughter.  My  memory  of  what  she  was 
like  in  those  days  has  grown  very  dim,  but  I  think 
her  sense  of  personality,  her  desire  of  any  life  of  her 
own,  had  disappeared  in  h-er  care  for  us  and  in  mUth 
anxiety  about  money.  I  always  see  her  sewing  or 
knitting  in  spectacles  and  wearing  some  plain  dress. 
Yet  ten  years  ago  when  I  was  in  San  Francisco,    ^.^ 

33  - — ^  ^  fc:^ 


an  old  cripple  came  to  see  me  who  had  left  Sligo  be- 
fore her  marriage  ;  he  came  to  tell  me,  he  said,  that 
my  mother  "had  been  the  most  beautiful  girl  in 
Sligo." 

The  only  lessons  I  had  ever  learned  were  those  my 
father  taught  me,  for  he  terrified  me  by  descrip- 
tions of  my  moral  degradation  and  he  humiliated 
me  by  my  likeness  to  disagreeable  people ;  but 
presently  I  was  sent  to  school  at  Hammersmith.  It 
was  a  Gothic  building  of  yellow  brick  :  a  large  hall 
full  of  desks,  some  small  class-rooms  and  a  separate 
house  for  boarders,  all  built  perhaps  in  1840  or  1850. 
I  thought  it  an  ancient  building  and  that  it  had  be- 
longed to  the  founder  of  the  school.  Lord  Godol- 
phin,  who  was  romantic  to  me  because  there  was  a 
novel  about  him.  I  never  read  the  novel,  but  I 
thought  only  romantic  people  were  put  in  books. 
On  one  side,  there  was  a  piano  factory  of  yellow 
brick,  upon  two  sides  half  finished  rows  of  little 
shops  and  villas  all  yellow  brick,  and  on  the  fourth 
side,  outside  the  wall  of  our  playing  field,  a  brickfield 
of  cinders  and  piles  of  half-burned  yellow  bricks.  All 
the  names  and  faces  of  my  school -fellows  have  faded 
from  me  except  one  name  without  a  face  and  the 
face  and  name  of  one  friend,  mainly  no  doubt  be- 
cause it  was  all  so  long  ago,  but  partly  because  I 
only  seem  to  remember  things  that  have  mixed 

34 


themselves  up  with  scenes  that  have  some  quality 
to  bring  them  again  and  again  before  the  memory. 
For  some  days,  as  I  walked  homeward  along  the 
Hammersmith  Road,  I  told  myself  that  whatever  I 
most  cared  for  had  been  taken  away.  I  had  found  a 
small,  green-covered  book  given  to  my  father  by  a 
Dublin  man  of  science  ;  it  gave  an  account  of  the 
strange  sea  creatures  the  man  of  science  had  dis- 
covered among  the  rocks  at  Howth  or  dredged  out 
of  Dublin  Bay.  It  had  long  been  my  favourite 
book ;  and  when  I  read  it  I  believed  that  I  was 
growing  very  wise,  but  now  I  should  have  no  time 
for  it  nor  for  my  own  thoughts.  Every  moment 
would  be  taken  up  learning  or  saying  lessons  or 
walking  between  school  and  home  four  times  a  day, 
for  I  came  home  in  the  middle  of  the  day  for  dinner. 
But  presently  I  forgot  my  trouble,  absorbed  in  two 
things  I  had  never  known,  companionship  and  en- 
mity. After  my  first  day's  lesson,  a  circle  of  boys 
had  got  around  me  in  a  playing  field  and  asked  me 
questions,  "who's  your  father?"  "what  does  he 
do ? "  "how  much  money  has  he ? "  Presently  a  boy 
said  something  insulting.  I  had  never  struck  any- 
body or  been  struck,  and  now  all  in  a  minute,  with- 
out any  intention  upon  my  side,  but  as  if  I  had  been 
a  doll  moved  by  a  string,  I  was  hitting  at  the  boys 
within  reach  and  being  hit.  After  that  I  was  called 

35 


names  for  being  Irish,  and  had  many  fights  and 
never,  for  years,  got  the  better  of  any  one  of  them  ; 
,  -^for  I  was  deHcate  and  had  no  muscles.  Sometimes, 
however,  I  found  means  of  retahation,  even  of  ag- 
gression. There  was  a  boy  with  a  big  stride,  much 
feared  by  Httle  boys,  and  finding  him  alone  in  the 
playing  field,  I  went  up  to  him  and  said,  ''rise  upon 
Sugaun  and  sink  upon  Gad."  "What  does  that 
mean ? "  he  said.  "Rise  upon  hay-leg  and  sink  upon 
straw,"  I  answered  and  told  him  that  in  Ireland 
the  sergeant  tied  straw  and  hay  to  the  ankles  of  a 
stupid  recruit  to  show  him  the  difference  between 
his  legs.  My  ears  were  boxed,  and  when  I  com- 
plained to  my  friends,  they  said  I  had  brought  it 
upon  myself ;  and  that  I  deserved  all  I  got.  I  prob- 
ably dared  myself  to  other  feats  of  a  like  sort, 
for  I  did  not  think  English  people  intelligent  or 
well-behaved  unless  they  were  artists.  Everyone 
I  knew  well  in  Sligo  despised  Nationalists  and 
Catholics,  but  all  disliked  England  with  a  prejudice 
that  had  come  down  perhaps  from  the  days  of  the 
Irish  Parliament.  I  knew  stories  to  the  discredit  of 
England,  and  took  them  all  seriously.  My  mother 
had  met  some  English  woman  who  did  not  like 
Dublin  because  the  legs  of  the  men  were  too 
straight,  and  at  Sligo,  as  everybody  knew,  an  Eng- 
lishman had  once  said  to  a  car-driver,   "if  you 

36 


people  were  not  so  lazy,  you  would  pull  down  the 
mountain  and  spread  it  out  over  the  sand  and  that 
would  give  you  acres  of  good  fields."  At  Sligo  there 
is  a  wide  river  mouth  and  at  ebb  tide  most  of  it  is 
dry  sand,  but  all  Sligo  knew  that  in  some  way  I  can- 
not remember  it  was  the  spreading  of  the  tide  over 
the  sand  that  left  the  narrow  channel  fit  for  ship- 
ing.  At  any  rate  the  carman  had  gone  chuckling  all 
over  Sligo  with  his  tale.  People  would  tell  it  to 
prove  that  Englishmen  were  always  grumbling. 
"They  grumble  about  their  dinners  and  everything 
—  there  was  an  Englishman  who  wanted  to  pull 
down  Knock-na-Rea "  and  so  on.  My  mother  had 
shown  them  to  me  kissing  at  railway  stations,  and 
taught  me  to  feel  disgust  at  their  lack  of  reserve, 
and  my  father  told  how  my  grandfather,  William 
Yeats,  who  had  died  before  I  was  bom,  when  he 
came  home  to  his  Rectory  in  County  Down  from  an 
English  visit,  spoke  of  some  man  he  had  met  on  a 
coach  road  who  "Englishman-like"  told  him  all  his 
affairs.  My  father  explained  that  an  Englishman 
generally  believed  that  his  private  affairs  did  him 
credit,  while  an  Irishman,  being  poor  and  probably 
in  debt,  had  no  such  confidence.  I,  however,  did 
not  believe  in  this  explanation.  My  Sligo  nurses, 
who  had  in  all  likelihood  the  Irish  Catholic  political 
hatred,  had  never  spoken  well  of  any  Englishman. 

37 


Once  when  walking  in  the  town  of  Sligo  I  had 
turned  to  look  after  an  English  man  and  woman 
whose  clothes  attracted  me.  The  man  I  remember 
had  gray  clothes  and  knee-breeches  and  the  woman 
a  gray  dress,  and  my  nurse  had  said  contemptu- 
ously, "towrows."  Perhaps  before  my  time,  there 
had  been  some  English  song  with  the  burden  "tow 
row  row,"  and  everybody  had  told  me  that  English 
people  ate  skates  and  even  dog-fish,  and  I  myself 
had  only  just  arrived  in  England  when  I  saw  an  old 
man  put  marmalade  in  his  porridge.  I  was  divided 
from  all  those  boys,  not  merely  by  the  anecdotes 
that  are  everywhere  perhaps  a  chief  expression  of 
the  distrust  of  races,  but  because  our  mental  im- 
ages were  different.  I  read  their  boys'  books  and 
they  excited  me,  but  if  I  read  of  some  English  vic- 
tory, I  did  not  believe  that  I  read  of  my  own  people. 
They  thought  of  Cressy  and  Agincourt  and  the 
Union  Jack  and  were  all  very  patriotic,  and  I,  with- 
out those  memories  of  Limerick  and  the  Yellow 
Ford  that  would  have  strengthened  an  Irish  Catho- 
lic, thought  of  mountain  and  lake,  of  my  grand- 
father and  of  ships.  Anti-Irish  feeling  was  running 
high,  for  the  Land  League  had  been  founded  and 
landlords  had  been  shot,  and  I,  who  had  no  politics, 
was  yet  full  of  pride,  for  it  is  romantic  to  live  in  a 
dangerous  country. 

38 


I  daresay  I  thought  the  rough  manners  of  a  cheap 
school,  as  my  grandfather  Yeats  had  those  of  a 
chance  companion,  typical  of  all  England.  At  any 
rate  I  had  a  harassed  life  &  got  many  a  black  eye 
and  had  many  outbursts  of  grief  and  rage.  Once  a 
boy,  the  son  of  a  great  Bohemian  glass-maker,  and 
who  was  older  than  the  rest  of  us,  and  had  been  sent 
out  of  his  country  because  of  a  love  affair,  beat  a  boy 
for  me  because  we  were  "both  foreigners."  And  a 
boy,  who  grew  to  be  the  school  athlete  and  my  chief 
friend,  beat  a  great  many.  His  are  the  face  and 
name  that  I  remember  —  his  name  was  of  Hugue- 
not origin  and  his  face  like  his  gaunt  and  lithe  body 
had  something  of  the  American  Indian  in  colour 
and  lineament. 

I  was  very  much  afraid  of  the  other  boys,  and  that 
made  me  doubt  myself  for  the  first  time.  When  I 
had  gathered  pieces  of  wood  in  the  corner  for  my 
great  ship,  I  was  confident  that  I  could  keep  calm 
among  the  storms  and  die  fighting  when  the  great 
battle  came.  But  now  I  was  ashamed  of  my  lack  of 
courage ;  for  I  wanted  to  be  like  my  grandfather 
who  thought  so  little  of  danger  that  he  had  jumped 
overboard  in  the  Bay  of  Biscay  after  an  old  hat.  I 
was  very  much  afraid  of  physical  pain,  and  one  day 
when  I  had  made  some  noise  in  class,  my  friend  the 
athlete  was  accused  and  I  allowed  him  to  get  two 

39 


strokes  of  the  cane  before  I  gave  myself  up.  He  had 
held  out  his  hands  without  flinching  and  had  not 
rubbed  them  on  his  sides  afterwards.  I  was  not 
caned,  but  was  made  to  stand  up  for  the  rest  of  the 
lesson.  I  suffered  very  much  afterwards  when  the 
thought  came  to  me,  but  he  did  not  reproach  me. 
I  had  been  some  years  at  school  before  I  had  my 
last  fight.  My  friend,  the  athlete,,  had  given  me 
many  months  of  peace,  but  at  last  refused  to  beat 
any  more  and  said  I  must  learn  to  box,  and  not  go 
near  the  other  boys  till  I  knew  how.  I  went  home 
with  him  every  day  and  boxed  in  his  room,  and  the 
bouts  had  always  the  same  ending.  My  excitability 
gave  me  an  advantage  at  first  and  I  would  drive 
him  across  the  room,  and  then  he  would  drive  me 
across  and  it  would  end  very  commonly  with  my 
nose  bleeding.  One  day  his  father,  an  elderly 
banker,  brought  us  out  into  the  garden  and  tried  to 
make  us  box  in  a  cold-blooded,  courteous  way,  but 
it  was  no  use.  At  last  he  said  I  might  go  near  the 
boys  again  and  I  was  no  sooner  inside  the  gate  of 
the  playing  field  than  a  boy  flung  a  handful  of 
mud  and  cried  out  "mad  Irishman."  I  hit  him 
several  times  on  the  face  without  being  hit,  till  the 
boys  round  said  we  should  make  friends.  I  held 
out  my  hand  in  fear ;  for  I  knew  if  we  went  on  I 
should  be  beaten,  and  he  took  it  sullenly.  I  had  so 

40 


poor  a  reputation  as  a  fighter  that  it  was  a  great  dis- 
grace to  him,  and  even  the  masters  made  fun  of  his 
swollen  face  ;  and  though  some  little  boys  came  in 
a  deputation  to  ask  me  to  lick  a  boy  they  named,  I 
had  never  another  fight  with  a  school -fellow.  We 
had  a  great  many  fights  with  the  street  boys  and 
the  boys  of  a  neighbouring  charity  school.  We  had 
always  the  better  because  we  were  not  allowed  to 
fling  stones,  and  that  compelled  us  to  close  or  do 
our  best  to  close.  The  monitors  had  been  told  to 
report  any  boy  who  fought  in  the  street,  but  they 
only  reported  those  who  flung  stones.  I  always  ran 
at  the  athlete's  heels,  but  I  never  hit  anyone.  My 
father  considered  these  fights  absurd,  and  even  that 
they  were  an  English  absurdity,  and  so  I  could  not 
get  angry  enough  to  like  hitting  and  being  hit ;  and 
then  too  my  friend  drove  the  enemy  before  him.  He 
had  no  doubts  or  speculations  to  lighten  his  fist  upon 
an  enemy,  that,  being  of  low  behaviour,  should  be 
beaten  as  often  as  possible,  and  there  were  real 
wrongs  to  avenge  :  one  of  our  boys  had  been  killed 
by  the  blow  of  a  stone  hid  in  a  snowball.  Sometimes 
we  on  our  side  got  into  trouble  with  the  parents  of 
boys.  There  was  a  quarrel  between  the  athlete  and 
an  old  German  who  had  a  barber's  shop  we  passed 
every  day  on  our  way  home,  and  one  day  he  spat 
through  the  window  and  hit  the  German  on  his  bald 

41 


head  —  the  monitors  had  not  forbidden  spitting. 
The  German  ran  after  us,  but  when  the  athlete 
squared  up  he  went  away.  Now,  though  I  knew  it 
was  not  right  to  spit  at  people,  my  admiration  for 
my  friend  arose  to  a  great  height.  I  spread  his  fame 
over  the  school,  and  next  day  there  was  a  fine  stir 
when  somebody  saw  the  old  German  going  up  the 
gravel  walk  to  the  head-master's  room.  Presently 
there  was  such  a  noise  in  the  passage  that  even  the 
master  had  to  listen.  It  was  the  head-master's  red- 
haired  brother  turning  the  old  German  out  and 
shouting  to  the  man-servant  "see  that  he  doesn't 
steal  the  top-coats."  We  heard  afterwards  that  he 
had  asked  the  names  of  the  two  boys  who  passed  his 
window  every  day  and  been  told  the  names  of  the 
two  head  boys  who  passed  also  but  were  notoriously 
gentlemanly  in  their  manners.  Yet  my  friend  was 
timid  also  and  that  restored  my  confidence  in  my- 
self. He  would  often  ask  me  to  buy  the  sweets  or 
the  ginger-beer  because  he  was  afraid  sometimes 
when  speaking  to  a  stranger. 

I  had  one  reputation  that  I  valued.  At  first  when  I 
went  to  the  Hammersmith  swimming-baths  with 
the  other  boys,  I  was  afraid  to  plunge  in  until  I  had 
gone  so  far  down  the  ladder  that  the  water  came  up 
to  my  thighs  ;  but  one  day  when  I  was  alone  I  fell 
from  the  spring-board  which  was  five  or  six  feet 

42 


above  the  water.  After  that  I  would  dive  from  a 
greater  height  than  the  others  and  I  practised  swim- 
ming under  water  and  pretending  not  to  be  out  of 
breath  when  I  came  up.  And  then  if  I  ran  a  race,  I 
took  care  not  to  pant  or  show  any  sign  of  strain. 
And  in  this  I  had  an  advantage  even  over  the  ath- 
lete ;  for  though  he  could  run  faster  and  was  harder 
to  tire  than  anybody  else,  he  grew  very  pale  and  I 
was  often  paid  compliments.  I  used  to  run  with  my 
friend  when  he  was  training  to  keep  him  in  com- 
pany. He  would  give  me  a  long  start  and  soon  over- 
take me. 

I  followed  the  career  of  a  certain  professional  runner 
for  months,  buying  papers  that  would  tell  me  if  he 
had  won  or  lost.  I  had  seen  him  described  as  "the 
bright  particular  star  of  American  athletics,"  and 
the  wonderful  phrase  had  thrown  enchantment 
over  him.  Had  he  been  called  the  particular  bright 
star,  I  should  have  cared  nothing  for  him.  I  did  not 
understand  the  symptom  for  years  after.  I  was 
nursing  my  own  dream,  my  form  of  the  common 
school -boy  dream,  though  I  was  no  longer  gathering 
the  little  pieces  of  broken  and  rotting  wood.  Often, 
instead  of  learning  my  lesson,  I  covered  the  white 
squares  of  the  chessboard  on  my  little  table  with 
pen  and  ink  pictures  of  myself,  doing  all  kinds  of 
courageous  things.  One  day  my  father  said  "there 

43 


\^ 


was  a  man  in  Nelson's  ship  at  the  battle  of  Trafal- 
gar, a  ship's  purser,  whose  hair  turned  white  ;  what 
a  sensitive  temperament ;  that  man  should  have 
achieved  something  ! "  I  was  vexed  and  bewildered, 
^  and  am  still  bewildered  and  still  vexed,  finding  it  a 
poor  and  crazy  thing  that  we  who  have  imagined  so 
many  noble  persons  cannot  bring  our  flesh  to  heel. 

VI 

The  head-master  was  a  clergyman,  a  good-hu- 
moured, easy-going  man,  as  temperate,  one  had  no 
doubt,  in  his  religious  life  as  in  all  else,  and  if  he  ever 
lost  sleep  on  our  account,  it  was  from  a  very  proper 
anxiety  as  to  our  gentility.  I  was  in  disgrace  once 
because  I  went  to  school  in  some  brilliant  blue 
homespun  serge  my  mother  had  bought  in  Dev- 
onshire, and  I  was  told  I  must  never  wear  it  again. 
He  had  tried  several  times,  though  he  must  have 
known  it  was  hopeless,  to  persuade  our  parents  to 
put  us  into  Eton  clothes,  and  on  certain  days  we 
were  compelled  to  wear  gloves.  After  my  first  year, 
we  were  forbidden  to  play  marbles  because  it  was  a 
form  of  gambling  and  was  played  by  nasty  little 
boys,  and  a  few  months  later  told  not  to  cross  our 
legs  in  class.  It  was  a  school  for  the  sons  of  profes- 
sional men  who  had  failed  or  were  at  the  outset 
of  their  career,  and  the  boys  held  an  indignation 

44 


meeting  when  they  discovered  that  a  new  boy  was 
an  apothecary's  son  (I  think  at  first  I  was  his  only 
friend,)  and  we  all  pretended  that  our  parents  were 
richer  than  they  were.  I  told  a  little  boy  who  had 
often  seen  my  mother  knitting  or  mending  my 
clothes  that  she  only  mended  or  knitted  because 
she  liked  it,  though  I  knew  it  was  necessity. 
It  was  like,  I  suppose,  most  schools  of  its  type,  an 
obscene,  bullying  place,  where  a  big  boy  would  hit 
a  small  boy  in  the  wind  to  see  him  double  up,  and 
where  certain  boys,  too  young  for  any  emotion  of 
sex,  would  sing  the  dirty  songs  of  the  street,  but  I 
daresay  it  suited  me  better  than  a  better  school.  I 
have  heard  the  head-master  say,  ''how  has  so-and- 
so  done  in  his  Greek?"  and  the  class-master  reply, 
"very  badly,  but  he  is  doing  well  in  his  cricket," 
and  the  head-master  has  gone  away  saying  "Oh, 
leave  him  alone."  I  was  unfitted  for  school  work, 
and  though  I  would  often  work  well  for  weeks  to- 
gether, I  had  to  give  the  whole  evening  to  one 
lesson  if  I  was  to  know  it.  My  thoughts  were  a 
great  excitement,  but  when  I  tried  to  do  any- 
thing with  them,  it  was  like  trying  to  pack  a 
balloon  into  a  shed  in  a  high  wind.  I  was  always 
near  the  bottom  of  my  class,  and  always  making 
excuses  that  but  added  to  my  timidity ;  but  no 
master  was  rough  with  me.  I  was  known  to  collect 

45 


moths  and  butterflies  and  to  get  into  no  worse 
mischief  than  hiding  now  and  again  an  old  tailless 
white  rat  in  my  coat-pocket  or  my  desk.  There  was 
but  one  interruption  of  our  quiet  habits,  the  brief 
engagement  of  an  Irish  master,  a  fine  Greek  scholar 
and  vehement  teacher,  but  of  fantastic  speech.  He 
would  open  the  class  by  saying,  "there  he  goes, 
there  he  goes,"  or  some  like  words  as  the  head- 
master passed  by  at  the  end  of  the  hall.  "  Of  course 
this  school  is  no  good.  How  could  it  be  with  a 
clergyman  for  head-master?"  And  then  perhaps 
his  eye  would  light  on  me,  and  he  would  make  me 
stand  up  and  tell  me  it  was  a  scandal  I  was  so  idle 
when  all  the  world  knew  that  any  Irish  boy  was 
cleverer  than  a  whole  class-room  of  English  boys,  a 
description  I  had  to  pay  for  afterwards.  Sometimes 
he  would  call  up  a  little  boy  who  had  a  girl's  face 
and  kiss  him  upon  both  cheeks  and  talk  of  taking 
him  to  Greece  in  the  holidays,  and  presently  we 
heard  he  had  written  to  the  boy's  parents  about  it, 
but  long  before  the  holidays  he  was  dismissed. 

VII 

Two  pictures  come  into  my  memory.  I  have 
climbed  to  the  top  of  a  tree  by  the  edge  of  the  play- 
ing field,  and  am  looking  at  my  school -fellows  and 
am  as  proud  of  myself  as  a  March  cock  when  it 

46 


crows  to  its  first  sunrise.  I  am  saying  to  myself,  "if 
when  I  grow  up  I  am  as  clever  among  grown-up  ,^^ 
men  as  I  am  among  these  boys,  I  shall  be  a  famous 
man."  I  remind  myself  how  they  think  all  the 
same  things  and  cover  the  school  walls  at  election 
times  with  the  opinions  their  fathers  find  in  the 
newspapers.  I  remind  myself  that  I  am  an  artist's 
son  and  must  take  some  work  as  the  whole  end  of  y^'^ 
life  and  not  think  as  the  others  do  of  becoming  well 
off  and  living  pleasantly.  The  other  picture  is  of  a 
hotel  sitting-room  in  the  Strand,  where  a  man  is 
hunched  up  over  the  fire.  He  is  a  cousin  who  has 
speculated  with  another  cousin's  money  and  has 
fled  from  Ireland  in  danger  of  arrest.  My  father 
has  brought  us  to  spend  the  evening  with  him,  to  f 
distract  him  from  the  remorse  my  father  knows 
that  he  must  be  suffering. 

VIII 

For  years  Bedford  Park  was  a  romantic  excitement. 
At  North  End  my  father  had  announced  at  break- 
fast that  our  glass  chandelier  was  absurd  and  was  to 
be  taken  down,  and  a  little  later  he  described  the 
village  Norman  Shaw  was  building.  I  had  thought 
he  said,  "there  is  to  be  a  wall  round  and  no  news- 
papers to  be  allowed  in."  And  when  I  had  told  him 
how  put  out  I  was  at  finding  neither  wall  nor  gate, 

47 


he  explained  that  he  had  merely  described  what 
ought  to  be.  We  were  to  see  De  Morgan  tiles,  pea- 
cock-blue doors  and  the  pomegranate  pattern  and 
the  tulip  pattern  of  Morris,  and  to  discover  that  we 
had  always  hated  doors  painted  with  imitation 
grain  and  the  roses  of  mid-Victoria,  and  tiles 
covered  with  geometrical  patterns  that  seemed  to 
have  been  shaken  out  of  a  muddy  kaleidoscope.  We 
went  to  live  in  a  house  like  those  we  had  seen  in  pic- 
tures and  even  met  people  dressed  like  people 
in  the  storybooks.  The  streets  were  not  straight  and 
dull  as  at  North  End,  but  wound  about  where  there 
was  a  big  tree  or  for  the  mere  pleasure  of  winding, 
and  there  were  wood  palings  instead  of  iron  railings. 
The  newness  of  everything,  the  empty  houses  where 
we  played  at  hide-and-seek,  and  the  strangeness  of 
it  all,  made  us  feel  that  we  were  living  among  toys. 
We  could  imagine  people  living  happy  lives  as  we 
thought  people  did  long  ago  when  the  poor  were 
picturesque  and  the  master  of  a  house  would  tell  of 
strange  adventures  over  the  sea.  Only  the  better 
houses  had  been  built.  The  commercial  builder  had 
not  begun  to  copy  and  to  cheapen,  and  besides  we 
only  knew  the  most  beautiful  houses,  the  houses  of 
artists.  My  two  sisters  and  my  brother  and  myself 
had  dancing  lessons  in  a  low,  red-brick  and  tiled 
house  that  drove  away  dreams,  long  cherished,  of 

48 


^ jclui.  fjdiitlcr  ^ilcaJ:^> 

f-r-trm    n    u,'-evte-roaio tiA-  clrutvlrva,  vy,  fviniJ^elf 


some  day  living  in  a  house  made  exactly  like  a 
ship's  cabin.  The  dining-room  table,  where  Sinbad 
the  sailor  might  have  sat,  was  painted  peacock- 
blue,  and  the  woodwork  was  all  peacock-blue  and 
upstairs  there  was  a  window  niche  so  big  and 
high  up,  there  was  a  flight  of  steps  to  go  up  and 
down  by  and  a  table  in  the  niche.  The  two  sisters 
of  the  master  of  the  house,  a  well-known  pre- 
Raphaelite  painter,  were  our  teachers,  and  they 
and  their  old  mother  were  dressed  in  peacock- 
blue  and  in  dresses  so  simply  cut  that  they  seemed 
a  part  of  every  story.  Once  when  I  had  been  look- 
ing with  delight  at  the  old  woman,  my  father  who 
had  begun  to  be  influenced  by  French  art,  mut- 
tered, "imagine  dressing  up  your  old  mother  like 
that." 

My  father's  friends  were  painters  who  had  been  in- 
fluenced by  the  pre-Raphaelite  movement  but  had 
lost  their  confidence.  Wilson,  Page,  Nettleship, 
Potter  are  the  names  I  remember,  and  at  North 
End,  I  remember  them  most  clearly.  I  often  heard 
one  and  another  say  that  Rossetti  had  never  mas- 
tered his  materials,  and  though  Nettleship  had  al- 
ready turned  lion-painter,  my  father  talked  con- 
stantly of  the  designs  of  his  youth,  especially  of 
"God  creating  Evil,"  which  Browning  praised  in  a 
letter  my  father  had  seen  "as  the  most  sublime 
E  49 


conception  in  ancient  or  modern  Art."  In  those 
early  days,  that  he  might  not  be  tempted  from  his 
work  by  society,  he  had  made  a  rent  in  the  tail  of 
his  coat ;  and  I  have  heard  my  mother  tell  how  she 
had  once  sewn  it  up,  but  before  he  came  again  he 
had  pulled  out  all  the  stitches.  Potter's  exquisite 
"Dormouse,"  now  in  the  Tate  Gallery,  hung  in  our 
house  for  years.  His  dearest  friend  was  a  pretty 
model  who  was,  when  my  memory  begins,  working 
for  some  position  in  a  board-school.  I  can  remem- 
ber her  sitting  at  the  side  of  the  throne  in  the  North 
End  Studio,  a  book  in  her  hand  and  my  father 
hearing  her  say  a  Latin  lesson.  Her  face  was  the 
typical  mild,  oval  face  of  the  painting  of  that  time, 
and  may  indeed  have  helped  in  the  moulding  of  an 
ideal  of  beauty.  I  found  it  the  other  day  drawn  in 
pencil  on  a  blank  leaf  of  a  volume  of  the"  Earthly 
Paradise."  It  was  at  Bedford  Park  that  I  had  heard 
Farrar,  whom  I  had  first  known  at  Bumham 
Beeches,  tell  of  Potter's  death  and  burial.  Potter 
had  been  very  poor  and  had  died  from  the  effects 
of  semi-starvation.  He  had  lived  so  long  on  bread 
and  tea  that  his  stomach  withered  —  I  am  sure  that 
was  the  word  used,  and  when  his  relations  found 
out  and  gave  him  good  food,  it  was  too  late.  Farrar 
had  been  at  the  funeral  and  had  stood  behind  some 
well-to-do  people  who  were  close  about  the  grave 

50 


and  saw  one  point  to  the  model,  who  had  followed 
the  hearse  on  foot  and  was  now  crying  at  a  distance, 
and  say,  "that  is  the  woman  who  had  all  his 
money."  She  had  often  begged  him  to  allow  her  to 
pay  his  debts,  but  he  would  not  have  it.  Probably 
his  rich  friends  blamed  his  poor  friends,  and  they 
the  rich,  and  I  daresay,  nobody  had  known  enough 
to  help  him.  Besides,  he  had  a  strange  form  of 
dissipation,  I  had  heard  someone  say ;  he  was  de- 
voted to  children,  and  would  become  interested  in 
some  child  —  his  "Dormouse"  is  a  portrait  of  a 
child  —  and  spend  his  money  on  its  education.  My 
sister  remembers  seeing  him  paint  with  a  dark  glove 
on  his  right  hand,  and  his  saying  that  he  had  used 
so  much  varnish  the  reflection  of  the  hand  would 
have  teased  him  but  for  the  glove.  "I  will  soon 
have  to  paint  my  face  some  dark  colour,"  he  added. 
I  have  no  memory,  however,  but  of  noticing  that 
he  sat  at  the  easel,  whereas  my  father  always  stands 
and  walks  up  and  down,  and  that  there  was  dark 
blue,  a  colour  that  always  affects  me,  in  the  back- 
ground of  his  picture.  There  is  a  public  gallery  of 
Wilson's  work  in  his  native  Aberdeen  and  my  sis- 
ters have  a  number  of  his  landscapes  —  wood- 
scenes  for  the  most  part  —  painted  with  phlegm 
and  melancholy,  the  romantic  movement  drawing 
to  its  latest  phase. 

51 


IX 

My  father  read  out  to  me,  for  the  first  time,  when  I 
was  eight  or  nine  years  old.  Between  SHgo  and 
Rosses  Point,  there  is  a  tongue  of  land  covered  with 
coarse  grass  that  runs  out  into  the  sea  or  the  mud 
according  to  the  state  of  the  tide.  It  is  the  place 
where  dead  horses  are  buried.  Sitting  there,  my 
father  read  me  ''The  Lays  of  Ancient  Rome."  It 
\^  was  the  first  poetry  that  had  moved  me  after  the 
stable-boy's  "Orange  Rhymes."  Later  on  he  read 
me  "Ivanhoe"  and  "The  Lay  of  the  Last  Min- 
strel," and  they  are  still  vivid  in  the  memory.  I  re- 
read "Ivanhoe"  the  other  day,  but  it  has  all 
vanished  except  Gurth,  the  swineherd,  at  the  outset 
and  Friar  Tuck  and  his  venison  pasty,  the  two 
scenes  that  laid  hold  of  me  in  childhood.  "  The  Lay 
of  the  Last  Minstrel "  gave  me  a  wish  to  turn  magi- 
cian that  competed  for  years  with  the  dream  of 
being  killed  upon  the  sea-shore.  When  I  first  went 
to  school,  he  tried  to  keep  me  from  reading  boys' 
papers,  because  a  paper,  by  its  very  nature,  as  he 
explained  to  me,  had  to  be  made  for  the  average 
boy  or  man  and  so  could  not  but  thwart  one's 
growth.  He  took  away  my  paper  and  I  had  not 
courage  to  say  that  I  was  but  reading  and  delighting 
in  a  prose  re-telling  of  the  Iliad.  But  after  a  few 

52 


months,  my  father  said  he  had  been  too  anxious  and 
became  less  urgent  about  my  lessons  and  less  vio- 
lent if  I  had  learnt  them  badly,  and  he  ceased  to 
notice  what  I  read.  From  that  on  I  shared  the  ex- 
citement which  ran  through  all  my  fellows  on  Wed- 
nesday afternoons  when  the  boys'  papers  were 
published,  and  I  read  endless  stories  I  have  for- 
gotten as  completely  as  Grimm's  Fairy  Tales  that  I 
read  at  Sligo,  and  all  of  Hans  Andersen  except  the 
Ugly  Duckling  which  my  mother  had  read  to  me 
and  to  my  sisters.  I  remember  vaguely  that  I  liked 
Hans  Andersen  better  than  Grimm  because  he  was 
less  homely,  but  even  he  never  gave  me  the  knights 
and  dragons  and  beautiful  ladies  that  I  longed  for.  I 
have  remembered  nothing  that  I  read,  but  only 
those  things  that  I  heard  or  saw.  When  I  was  ten  or 
twelve  my  father  took  me  to  see  Irving  play  Ham- 
let, and  did  not  understand  why  I  preferred  Irving 
to  Ellen  Terry,  who  was,  I  can  now  see,  the  idol  of 
himself  and  his  friends.  I  could  not  think  of  her,  as 
I  could  of  Irving's  Hamlet,  as  but  myself,  and  I  was 
not  old  enough  to  care  for  feminine  charm  and 
beauty.  For  many  years  Hamlet  was  an  image  of 
heroic  self-possession  for  the  poses  of  youth  and  1^ 
childhood  to  copy,  a  combatant  of  the  battle  within 
myself.  My  father  had  read  me  the  story  of  the 
little  boy  murdered  by  the  Jews  in  Chaucer  and  the 

53 


tale  of  Sir  Topaz,  explaining  the  hard  words,  and 
though  both  excited  me,  I  had  liked  Sir  Topaz  best 
and  been  disappointed  that  it  left  off  in  the  middle. 
As  I  grew  older,  he  would  tell  me  plots  of  Balzac's 
novels,  using  incident  or  character  as  an  illustration 
for  some  profound  criticism  of  life.  Now  that  I  have 
read  all  the  Comedie  Humaine,  certain  pages  have 
an  unnatural  emphasis,  straining  and  overbalanc- 
ing the  outline,  and  I  remember  how  in  some  subur- 
ban street,  he  told  me  of  Lucien  de  Rubempre,  or  of 
the  duel  after  the  betrayal  of  his  master,  and  how 
the  wounded  Lucien  had  muttered  '*so  much  the 
worse"  when  he  heard  someone  say  that  he  was  not 
dead. 

I  now  can  but  share  with  a  friend  my  thoughts  and 
my  emotions,  and  there  is  a  continual  discovery  of 
difference,  but  in  those  days,  before  I  had  found 
^^  myself,  we  could  share  adventures.  When  friends 
•>v  plan  and  do  together,  their  minds  become  one  mind 
and  the  last  secret  disappears.  I  was  useless  at 
games.  I  cannot  remember  that  I  ever  kicked  a 
goal  or  made  a  run,  but  I  was  a  mine  of  knowledge 
when  I  and  the  athlete  and  those  two  notoriously 
gentlemanly  boys  —  theirs  was  the  name  that  I  re- 
member without  a  face  —  set  out  for  Richmond 
Park,  for  Coomb  Wood  or  Twyford  Abbey  to  look 
for  butterflies  and  moths  and  beetles.  Sometimes 

54 


to-day  I  meet  people  at  lunch  or  dinner  whose 
address  will  sound  familiar  and  I  remember  of  a 
sudden  how  a  game-keeper  chased  me  from  the 
plantation  behind  their  house,  and  how  I  have 
turned  over  the  cow-dung  in  their  paddock  in  the 
search  for  some  rare  beetle  believed  to  haunt  the 
spot.  The  athlete  was  our  watchman  and  our 
safety.  He  would  suggest,  should  we  meet  a  carriage 
on  the  drive,  that  we  take  off  our  hats  and  walk  on 
as  though  about  to  pay  a  call.  And  once  when  we 
were  sighted  by  a  game-keeper  at  Coomb  Wood, 
he  persuaded  the  eldest  of  the  brothers  to  pretend  to 
be  a  school -master  taking  his  boys  for  a  walk,  and 
the  keeper,  instead  of  swearing  and  threatening  the 
law,  was  sad  and  argumentative.  No  matter  how 
charming  the  place,  (and  there  is  a  little  stream  in 
a  hollow  where  Wimbledon  Common  flows  into 
Coomb  Wood  that  is  pleasant  in  the  memory,)  I 
knew  that  those  other  boys  saw  something  I  did  not 
see.  I  was  a  stranger  there.  There  was  something 
in  their  way  of  saying  the  names  of  places  that  made 
me  feel  this. 

X 

When  I  arrived  at  the  Clarence  Basin,  Liverpool, 
(the  dock  Clarence  Mangan  had  his  first  name 
from)  on  my  way  to  Sligo  for  my  holidays  I  was 
among  Sligo  people.  When  I  was  a  little  boy,  an  old 

55 


V^' 


woman  who  had  come  to  Liverpool  with  crates  of 
fowl,  made  me  miserable  by  throwing  her  arms 
around  me  the  moment  I  had  alighted  from  my  cab 
and  telling  the  sailor  who  carried  my  luggage  that 
she  had  held  me  in  her  arms  when  I  was  a  baby. 
The  sailor  may  have  known  me  almost  as  well,  for  I 
was  often  at  Sligo  quay  to  sail  my  boat ;  and  I  came 
and  went  once  or  twice  in  every  year  upon  the  ss. 
Sligo  or  the  ss.  Liverpool  which  belonged  to  a  com- 
pany that  had  for  directors  my  grandfather,  and  his 
partner  William  Middleton.  I  was  always  pleased  if 
it  was  the  Liverpool,  for  she  had  been  built  to  run 
the  blockade  during  the  war  of  North  and  South. 
I  waited  for  this  voyage  always  with  excitement 
and  boasted  to  other  boys  about  it,  and  when  I  was 
a  little  boy  had  walked  with  my  feet  apart  as  I  had 
seen  sailors  walk.  I  used  to  be  sea-sick,  but  I  must 
have  hidden  this  from  the  other  boys  and  partly 
even  from  myself ;  for,  as  I  look  back,  I  remember 
very  little  about  it,  while  I  remember  stories  I  was 
told  by  the  captain  or  by  his  first  mate,  and  the  look 
of  the  great  cliffs  of  Donegal  &  Tory  Island  men 
coming  alongside  with  lobsters,  talking  Irish  and,  if 
it  was  night,  blowing  on  a  burning  sod  to  draw  our 
attention.  The  captain,  an  old  man  with  square 
shoulders  and  a  fringe  of  grey  hair  round  his  face, 
would  tell  his  first  mate,  a  very  admiring  man,  of 

56 


fights  he  had  had  on  shore  at  Liverpool ;  and 
perhaps  it  was  of  him  I  was  thinking  when  I  was 
very  small  and  asked  my  grandmother  if  God  was 
as  strong  as  sailors.  Once,  at  any  rate,  he  had  been 
nearly  wrecked ;  the  Liverpool  had  been  all  but 
blown  upon  the  Mull  of  Galloway  with  her  shaft 
broken,  and  the  captain  had  said  to  his  mate, 
"mind  and  jump  when  she  strikes,  for  we  don't 
want  to  be  killed  by  the  falling  spars ;"  and  when 
the  mate  answered,  *'my  God,  I  cannot  swim,"  he 
had  said,  "who  could  keep  afloat  for  five  minutes 
in  a  sea  like  that?"  He  would  often  say  his  mate 
was  the  most  timid  of  men  and  that  "a  girl  along 
the  quays  could  laugh  him  out  of  anything."  My 
grandfather  had  more  than  once  given  the  mate  a 
ship  of  his  own,  but  he  had  always  thrown  up  his 
berth  to  sail  with  his  old  captain  where  he  felt  safe. 
Once  he  had  been  put  in  charge  of  a  ship  in  a  dry 
dock  in  Liverpool,  but  a  boy  was  drowned  in  Sligo, 
and  before  the  news  could  reach  him  he  wired  to  his 
wife,  "ghost,  come  at  once,  or  I  will  throw  up 
berth."  He  had  been  wrecked  a  number  of  times 
and  maybe  that  had  broken  his  nerve  or  maybe  he 
had  a  sensitiveness  that  would  in  another  class  have 
given  him  taste  &  culture.  I  once  forgot  a  copy  of 
"Count  Robert  of  Paris"  on  a  deck-seat,  and  when 
I  found  it  again,  it  was  all  covered  with  the  prints  of 

57 


his  dirty  thumb.  He  had  once  seen  the  coach-a-baur 
or  death  coach.  It  came  along  the  road,  he  said,  till 
it  was  hidden  by  a  cottage  and  it  never  came  out  on 
the  other  side  of  the  cottage.  Once  I  smelled  new- 
mown  hay  when  we  were  quite  a  long  way  from 
land,  and  once  when  I  was  watching  the  sea-parrots 
(as  the  sailors  call  the  puffin)  I  noticed  they  had  dif- 
ferent ways  of  tucking  their  heads  under  their  wings, 
or  I  fancied  it  and  said  to  the  captain ' '  they  have  dif- 
ferent characters."  Sometimes  my  father  came  too, 
\  and  the  sailors  when  they  saw  him  coming  would 
say  "there  is  John  Yeats  and  we  shall  have  a 
storm,"  for  he  was  considered  unlucky. 
I  no  longer  cared  for  little  shut-in-places,  for  a  cop- 
pice against  the  stable-yard  at  Merville  where  my 
grandfather  lived  or  against  the  gable  at  Seaview 
where  Aunt  Micky  lived,  and  I  began  to  climb  the 
mountains,  sometimes  with  the  stable-boy  for  com- 
panion, and  to  look  up  their  stories  in  the  county 
history.  I  fished  for  trout  with  a  worm  in  the 
mountain  streams  and  went  out  herring-fishing  at 
night :  and  because  my  grandfather  had  said  the 
English  were  in  the  right  to  eat  skates,  I  carried  a 
large  skate  all  the  six  miles  or  so  from  Rosses  Point, 
but  my  grandfather  did  not  eat  it. 
One  night  just  as  the  equinoctial  gales  were  coming 
when  I  was  sailing  home  in  the  coastguard's  boat  a 

58 


boy  told  me  a  beetle  of  solid  gold,  strayed  maybe 
from  Poe's  "gold  bug,"  had  been  seen  by  somebody 
in  Scotland  and  I  do  not  think  that  either  of  us 
doubted  his  news.  Indeed,  so  many  stories  did  I 
hear  from  sailors  along  the  wharf,  or  round  the  fo'- 
castle  fire  of  the  little  steamer  that  ran  between 
Sligo  and  Rosses,  or  from  boys  out  fishing  that  the 
world  was  full  of  monsters  and  marvels.  The  V^ 
foreign  sailors  wearing  ear-rings  did  not  tell  me 
stories,  but  like  the  fishing  boys,  I  gazed  at  them 
in  wonder  and  admiration.  When  I  look  at  my 
brother's  picture,  "Memory  Harbour,"  houses  and 
anchored  ship  and  distant  lighthouse  all  set  close 
together  as  in  some  old  map,  I  recognize  in  the  blue- 
coated  man  with  the  mass  of  white  shirt  the  pilot  I 
went  fishing  with,  and  I  am  full  of  disquiet  and  of  ex- 
citement, and  I  am  melancholy  because  I  have  not 
made  more  and  better  verses.  I  have  walked  on 
Sinbad's  yellow  shore  and  never  shall  another  hit 
my  fancy. 

I  had  still  my  red  pony,  and  once  my  father  came 
with  me  riding  too,  and  was  very  exacting.  He  was 
indignant  and  threatening  because  he  did  not  think 
I  rode  well.  "You  must  do  everything  well,"  he 
said,  "that  the  Poll exf ens  respect,  though  you  must 
do  other  things  also."  He  used  to  say  the  same 
about  my  lessons,  and  tell  me  to  be  good  at  mathe- 

59 


matics.  I  can  see  now  that  he  had  a  sense  of  in- 
feriority among  those  energetic,  successful  people. 
He  himself,  some  Pollexfen  told  me,  though  he  rode 
very  badly,  would  go  hunting  upon  anything  and 
take  any  ditch.  His  father,  the  County  Down 
Rector,  though  a  courtly  man  and  a  scholar,  had 
been  so  dandified  a  horseman  that  I  had  heard  of 
his  splitting  three  riding  breeches  before  he  had 
settled  into  his  saddle  for  a  day's  hunting,  and  of 
his  first  rector  exclaiming,  **  I  had  hoped  for  a  cu- 
rate but  they  have  sent  me  a  jockey." 
Left  to  myself,  I  rode  without  ambition  though  get- 
ting many  falls,  and  more  often  to  Rathbroughan 
where  my  great-uncle  Mat  lived,  than  to  any  place 
else.  His  children  and  I  used  to  sail  our  toy-boats  in 
the  river  before  his  house,  arming  them  with  toy- 
cannon,  touch-paper  at  all  the  touch-holes,  always 
hoping  but  always  in  vain  that  they  would  not 
twist  about  in  the  eddies  but  fire  their  cannon  at 
one  another.  I  must  have  gone  to  Sligo  sometimes 
in  the  Christmas  holidays,  for  I  can  remember  riding 
my  red  pony  to  a  hunt.  He  balked  at  the  first  jump, 
to  my  relief,  and  when  a  crowd  of  boys  began  to 
beat  him,  I  would  not  allow  it.  They  all  jeered  at 
me  for  being  afraid.  I  found  a  gap  and  when  I  was 
alone  in  a  field  tried  another  ditch,  but  the  pony 
would  not  jump  that  either ;  so  I  tied  him  to  a  tree 

60 


and  lay  down  among  the  ferns  and  looked  up  into 
the  sky.  On  my  way  home  I  met  the  hunt  again 
and  noticed  that  everybody  avoided  the  dogs,  and 
because  I  wanted  to  find  out  why  they  did  so  I  rode 
to  where  the  dogs  had  gathered  in  the  middle  of 
the  lane  and  stood  my  pony  amongst  them,  and 
everybody  began  to  shout  at  me. 
Sometimes  I  would  ride  to  Castle  Dargan,  where 
lived  a  brawling  squireen,  married  to  one  of  my 
Middleton  cousins,  and  once  I  went  thither  on  a 
visit  with  my  cousin  George  Middleton.  It  was,  I 
dare  say,  the  last  household  where  I  could  have 
found  the  reckless  Ireland  of  a  hundred  years  ago  in 
final  degradation.  But  I  liked  the  place  for  the  ro- 
mance of  its  two  ruined  castles  facing  one  another 
across  a  little  lake.  Castle  Dargan  and  Castle  Fury. 
The  squireen  lived  in  a  small  house  whither  his 
family  had  moved  from  their  castle  some  time  in 
the  18th  century,  and  two  old  Miss  Furys,  who  let 
lodgings  in  Sligo,  were  the  last  remnants  of  the  breed 
of  the  other  ruin.  Once  in  every  year  he  drove  to 
Sligo  for  the  two  old  women,  that  they  might  look 
upon  the  ancestral  stones  and  remember  their  gen- 
tility, and  he  would  put  his  wildest  horses  into  the 
shafts  to  enjoy  their  terror. 

He  himself,  with  a  reeling  imagination,  knew  not 
what  he  could  be  at  to  find  a  spur  for  the  heavy 

61 


hours.  The  first  day  I  came  there,  he  gave  my  cous- 
in a  revolver,  (we  were  upon  the  high  road,)  and  to 
show  it  off,  or  his  own  shooting,  he  shot  a  passing 
chicken ;  and  half  an  hour  later,  when  he  had 
brought  us  to  the  lake's  edge  under  his  castle,  now 
but  the  broken  corner  of  a  tower  with  a  winding 
stair,  he  fired  at  or  over  an  old  countryman  who 
was  walking  on  the  far  edge  of  the  lake.  The  next 
day  I  heard  him  settling  the  matter  with  the  old 
countryman  over  a  bottle  of  whiskey,  and  both 
were  in  good  humour.  Once  he  had  asked  a  timid 
aunt  of  mine  if  she  would  like  to  see  his  last  new  pet, 
and  thereupon  had  marched  a  race-horse  in  through 
the  hall  door  and  round  the  dining-room  table. 
And  once  she  came  down  to  a  bare  table  because  he 
had  thought  it  a  good  joke  to  open  the  window  and 
let  his  harriers  eat  the  breakfast.  There  was  a 
current  story,  too,  of  his  shooting,  in  the  pride  of 
his  marksmanship,  at  his  own  door  with  a  Martini- 
Henry  rifle  till  he  had  shot  the  knocker  off.  At  last 
he  quarrelled  with  my  great-uncle  William  Middle- 
ton,  and  to  avenge  himself  gathered  a  rabble  of  wild 
country-lads  and  mounted  them  and  himself  upon 
the  most  broken-down  rascally  horses  he  could  lay 
hands  on  and  marched  them  through  Sligo  under  a 
land-league  banner.  After  that,  having  neither 
friends  nor  money,  he  made  off  to  Australia  or  to 

62 


Canada.  I  fished  for  pike  at  Castle  Dargan  and 
shot  at  birds  with  a  muzzle-loading  pistol  until 
somebody  shot  a  rabbit  and  I   heard    it  squeal. 
From  that  on  I  would  kill  nothing  but  the  dumb     *^ 
fish. 

XI 

We  left  Bedford  Park  for  a  long  thatched  house  at 
Howth,  Co,  Dublin.  The  land  war  was  now  at  its 
height  and  our  Kildare  land,  that  had  been  in  the 
family  for  many  generations,  was  slipping  from  us. 
Rents  had  fallen  more  and  more,  we  had  to  sell  to 
pay  some  charge  or  mortgage,  but  my  father  and 
his  tenants  parted  without  ill-will.  During  the 
worst  times  an  old  tenant  had  under  his  roof  my 
father's  shooting-dog  and  gave  it  better  care  than 
the  annual  payment  earned.  He  had  set  apart  for 
its  comfort  the  best  place  at  the  fire ;  and  if  some 
man  were  in  the  place  when  the  dog  walked  into  the 
house,  the  man  must  needs  make  room  for  the  dog. 
And  a  good  while  after  the  sale,  I  can  remember  my 
father  being  called  upon  to  settle  some  dispute  be- 
tween this  old  man  and  his  sons. 
I  was  now  fifteen  ;  and  as  he  did  not  want  to  leave 
his  painting  my  father  told  me  to  go  to  Harcourt 
Street  and  put  myself  to  school.  I  found  a  bleak 
18th  century  house  and  a  small  playing-field  full  of 
mud  and  pebbles,  fenced  by  an  iron  railing  from  a 

63 


wide  18th  century  street,  but  opposite  a  long 
hoarding  and  a  squalid,  ornamental  railway  sta- 
tion. Here,  as  I  soon  found,  nobody  gave  a  thought 
to  decorum.  We  worked  in  a  din  of  voices.  We 
began  the  morning  with  prayers,  but  when  class 
began  the  head-master,  if  he  was  in  the  humour, 
would  laugh  at  Church  and  Clergy.  "Let  them  say 
what  they  like,"  he  would  say,  "but  the  earth  does 
go  round  the  sun."  On  the  other  hand  there  was  no 
bullying  and  I  had  not  thought  it  possible  that  boys 
could  work  so  hard.  Cricket  and  football,  the  col- 
lection of  moths  and  butterflies,  though  not  for- 
bidden, were  discouraged.  They  were  for  idle  boys. 
I  did  not  know,  as  I  used  to,  the  mass  of  my  school- 
fellows ;  for  we  had  little  life  in  common  outside 
the  class-rooms.  I  had  begun  to  think  of  my  school- 
work  as  an  interruption  of  my  natural  history 
studies,  but  even  had  I  never  opened  a  book  not 
in  the  school  course,  I  could  not  have  learned  a 
quarter  of  my  night's  work.  I  had  always  done 
Euclid  easily,  making  the  problems  out  while  the 
other  boys  were  blundering  at  the  blackboard,  and 
it  had  often  carried  me  from  the  bottom  to  the  top 
of  my  class  ;  but  these  boys  had  the  same  natural 
gift  and  instead  of  being  in  the  fourth  or  fifth  book 
were  in  the  modern  books  at  the  end  of  the  primer ; 
and  in  place  of  a  dozen  lines  of  Virgil  with  a  diction- 

64 


ary,  I  was  expected  to  learn  with  the  help  of  a  crib  a 
hundred  and  fifty  lines.  The  other  boys  were  able 
to  learn  the  translation  off,  and  to  remember  what 
words  of  Latin  and  English  corresponded  with  one 
another,  but  I,  who  it  may  be  had  tried  to  find  out 
what  happened  in  the  parts  we  had  not  read,  made 
ridiculous  mistakes ;  and  what  could  I,  who  never 
worked  when  I  was  not  interested,  do  with  a  history 
lesson  that  was  but  a  column  of  seventy  dates  ?  I 
was  worst  of  all  at  literature,  for  we  read  Shake- 
speare for  his  grammar  exclusively. 
One  day  I  had  a  lucky  thought.  A  great  many 
lessons  were  run  through  in  the  last  hour  of  the  day, 
things  we  had  learnt  or  should  have  learnt  by 
heart  over  night,  and  after  not  having  known  one  of 
them  for  weeks,  I  cut  off  that  hour  without  any- 
body's leave.  I  asked  the  mathematical  master  to 
give  me  a  sum  to  work  and  nobody  said  a  word. 
My  father  often  interfered,  and  always  with  disas- 
ter, to  teach  me  my  Latin  lesson.  "But  I  have  also 
my  geography,"  I  would  say.  "Geography,"  he 
would  reply,  "should  never  be  taught.  It  is  not  a 
training  for  the  mind.  You  will  pick  up  all  that  you 
need,  in  your  general  reading."  And  if  it  was  a 
history  lesson,  he  would  say  just  the  same,  and 
"Euclid,"  he  would  say,  "is  too  easy.  It  comes 
naturally  to  the  literary  imagination.  The  old  idea, 
F  65 


'^ 


that  it  is  a  good  training  for  the  mind,  was  long  ago 
refuted."  I  would  know  my  Latin  lesson  so  that 
it  was  a  nine  days'  wonder,  and  for  weeks  after 
would  be  told  it  was  scandalous  to  be  so  clever  and  so 
idle.  No  one  knew  that  I  had  learnt  it  in  the  terror 
that  alone  could  check  my  wandering  mind.  I  must 
have  told  on  him  at  some  time  or  other  for  I  re- 
member the  head-master  saying,  "I  am  going  to 
give  you  an  imposition  because  I  cannot  get  at  your 
father  to  give  him  one."  Sometimes  we  had  essays 
to  write ;  &  though  I  never  got  a  prize,  for  the 
essays  were  judged  by  hand-writing  and  spelling  I 
caused  a  measure  of  scandal.  I  would  be  called  up 
before  some  master  and  asked  if  I  really  believed 
such  things,  and  that  would  make  me  angry  for  I 
had  written  what  I  had  believed  all  my  life,  what 
my  father  had  told  me,  or  a  memory  of  the  conver- 
sation of  his  friends.  There  were  other  beliefs,  but 
they  were  held  by  people  one  did  not  know,  people 
who  were  vulgar  or  stupid.  I  was  asked  to  write  an 
essay  on  "men  may  rise  on  stepping-stones  of  their 
dead  selves  to  higher  things."  My  father  read  the 
subject  to  my  mother,  who  had  no  interest  in  such 
matters.  "That  is  the  way,"  he  said,  "boys  are 
made  insincere  and  false  to  themselves.  Ideals 
make  the  blood  thin,  and  take  the  human  nature 
out  of  people."  He  walked  up  and  down  the  room 

66 


in  eloquent  indignation,  and  told  me  not  to  write  on 
such  a  subject  at  all,  but  upon  Shakespeare's  lines 
**  to  thine  own  self  be  true,  and  it  must  follow  as  the 
night  the  day  thou  canst  not  then  be  false  to  any 
man."  At  another  time,  he  would  denounce  the 
idea  of  duty,  and  "imagine,"  he  would  say,  "how 
the  right  sort  of  woman  would  despise  a  dutiful  hus- 
band ; "  and  he  would  tell  us  how  much  my  mother 
would  scorn  such  a  thing.  Maybe  there  were  people 
among  whom  such  ideas  were  natural,  but  they 
were  the  people  with  whom  one  does  not  dine.  All 
he  said  was,  I  now  believe  right,  but  he  should  have 
taken  me  away  from  school.  He  would  have  taught 
me  nothing  but  Greek  and  Latin,  and  I  would  now 
be  a  properly  educated  man,  and  would  not  have 
to  look  in  useless  longing  at  books  that  have  been, 
through  the  poor  mechanism  of  translation,  the 
builders  of  my  soul,  nor  faced  authority  with  the 
timidity  born  of  excuse  and  evasion.  Evasion  and 
excuse  were  in  the  event  as  wise  as  the  house-build- 
ing instinct  of  the  beaver. 

XII 

My  London  schoolfellow,  the  athlete,  spent  a 
summer  with  us,  but  the  friendship  of  boyhood, 
founded  upon  action  and  adventure,  was  drawing 
to  an  end.  He  was  still  my  superior  in  all  physical 

67 


activity  and  climbed  to  places  among  the  rocks  that 
even  now  are  uncomfortable  memories,  but  I  had 
begun  to  criticize  him.  One  morning  I  proposed  a 
journey  to  Lambay  Island,  and  was  contemptuous 
because  he  said  we  should  miss  our  mid-day  meal. 
We  hoisted  a  sail  on  our  small  boat  and  ran  quickly 
over  the  nine  miles  and  saw  on  the  shore  a  tame 
sea-gull,  while  a  couple  of  boys,  the  sons  of  a  coast- 
guard, ran  into  the  water  in  their  clothes  to  pull  us 
to  land,  as  we  had  read  of  savage  people  doing.  We 
spent  an  hour  upon  the  sunny  shore  and  I  said,  '*I 
would  like  to  live  here  always,  and  perhaps  some 
day  I  will."  I  was  always  discovering  places 
where  I  would  like  to  spend  my  whole  life.  We 
started  to  row  home,  and  when  dinner-time  had 
passed  for  about  an  hour,  the  athlete  lay  down  on 
the  bottom  of  the  boat  doubled  up  with  the  gripes. 
I  mocked  at  him  and  at  his  fellow-countrymen 
whose  stomachs  struck  the  hour  as  if  they  were 
clocks. 

Our  natural  history,  too,  began  to  pull  us  apart.  I 
planned  some  day  to  write  a  book  about  the 
changes  through  a  twelve-month  among  the  crea- 
tures of  some  hole  in  the  rock,  and  had  some  theory 
of  my  own,  which  I  cannot  remember,  as  to  the 
colour  of  sea-anemones  :  and  after  much  hesitation, 
trouble  and  bewilderment,  was  hot  for  argument  in 

68 


refutation  of  Adam  and  Noah  and  the  Seven  Days. 
I  had  read  Darwin  and  Wallace,  Huxley  and 
Haeckel,  and  would  spend  hours  on  a  holiday 
plaguing  a  pious  geologist,  who,  when  not  at  some  job 
in  Guinness's  brewery,  came  with  a  hammer  to  look 
for  fossils  in  the  Howth  Cliffs.  "You  know,"  I 
would  say,  ''that  such  and  such  human  remains 
cannot  be  less,  because  of  the  strata  they  were 
found  in,  than  fifty  thousand  years  old."  "Oh!" 
he  would  answer,  "they  are  an  isolated  instance." 
And  once  when  I  pressed  hard  my  case  against 
Ussher's  chronology,  he  begged  me  not  to  speak  of 
the  subject  again.  "  If  I  believed  what  you  do,"  he 
said,  "I  could  not  live  a  moral  life."  But  I  could 
not  even  argue  with  the  athlete  who  still  collected  ^.^ 

his  butterflies  for  the  adventure's  sake,  and  with  no  cVtX^ 
curiosity  but  for  their  names.  I  began  to  judge  his 
intelligence,  and  to  tell  him  that  his  natural  history 
had  as  little  to  do  with  science  as  his  collection  of 
postage  stamps.  Even  during  my  school  days  in 
London,  influenced  perhaps  by  my  father,  I  had 
looked  down  upon  the  postage  stamps. 

XIII 

Our  house  for  the  first  year  or  so  was  on  the  top  of 
a  cliff,  so  that  in  stormy  weather  the  spray  would 
sometimes  soak  my  bed  at  night,  for  I  had  taken 

69 


the  glass  out  of  the  window,  sash  and  all.  A  literary 
passion  for  the  open  air  was  to  last  me  for  a  few 
years.  Then  for  another  year  or  two,  we  had  a 
house  overlooking  the  harbour  where  the  one  great 
sight  was  the  going  and  coming  of  the  fishing  fleet. 
We  had  one  regular  servant,  a  fisherman's  wife,  and 
the  occasional  help  of  a  big,  red-faced  girl  who  ate  a 
whole  pot  of  jam  while  my  mother  was  at  church 
and  accused  me  of  it.  Some  such  arrangement 
lasted  until  long  after  the  time  I  write  of,  and  until 
my  father  going  into  the  kitchen  by  chance  found  a 
girl,  who  had  been  engaged  during  a  passing  need, 
in  tears  at  the  thought  of  leaving  our  other  servant, 
and  promised  that  they  should  never  be  parted.  I 
have  no  doubt  that  we  lived  at  the  harbour  for 
my  mother's  sake.  She  had,  when  we  were  children, 
refused  to  take  us  to  a  seaside  place  because  she 
heard  it  possessed  a  bathing  box,  but  she  loved  the 
activities  of  a  fishing  village.  When  I  think  of  her,  I 
almost  always  see  her  talking  over  a  cup  of  tea  in 
the  kitchen  with  our  servant,  the  fisherman's  wife, 
on  the  only  themes  outside  our  house  that  seemed 
of  interest  —  the  fishing  people  of  Howth,  or  the 
pilots  and  fishing  people  of  Rosses  Point.  She  read 
no  books,  but  she  and  the  fisherman's  wife  would 
tell  each  other  stories  that  Homer  might  have  told, 
pleased  with  any  moment  of  sudden  intensity  and 

70 


laughing  together  over  any  point  of  satire.  There 
is  an  essay  called  "Village  Ghosts"  in  my  "Celtic 
Twilight"  which  is  but  a  record  of  one  such  after- 
noon, and  many  a  fine  tale  has  been  lost  because  it 
had  not  occurred  to  me  soon  enough  to  keep  notes. 
My  father  was  always  praising  her  to  my  sisters  and 
to  me,  because  she  pretended  to  nothing  she  did  not 
feel.  She  would  write  him  letters  telling  of  her  de- 
light in  the  tumbling  clouds,  but  she  did  not  care 
for  pictures,  and  never  went  to  an  exhibition  even 
to  see  a  picture  of  his,  nor  to  his  studio  to  see  the 
day's  work,  neither  now  nor  when  they  were  first 
married.  I  remember  all  this  very  clearly  and  little 
after  until  her  mind  had  gone  in  a  stroke  of  paraly- 
sis and  she  had  found,  liberated  at  last  from  finan- 
cial worry,  perfect  happiness  feeding  the  birds  at 
a  London  window.  She  had  always,  my  father 
would  say,  intensity,  and  that  was  his  chief  word 
of  praise;  and  once  he  added  to  the  praise  "no 
spendthrift  ever  had  a  poet  for  a  son,  though  a 
miser  might." 

XIV 

The  great  event  of  a  boy's  life  is  the  awakening  of 
sex.  He  will  bathe  many  times  a  day,  or  get  up  at 
dawn  and  having  stripped  leap  to  and  fro  over  a 
stick  laid  upon  two  chairs  and  hardly  know,  and 
never  admit,  that  he  had  begun  to  take  pleasure  in 

71 


his  own  nakedness,  nor  will  he  understand  the 
change  until  some  dream  discovers  it.  He  may 
never  understand  at  all  the  greater  change  in  his 
mind. 

It  all  came  upon  me  when  I  was  close  upon  seven- 
teen like  the  bursting  of  a  shell.  Somnambulistic 
country-girls,  when  it  is  upon  them,  throw  plates 
about  or  pull  them  with  long  hairs  in  simulation  of 
the  polter-geist,  or  become  mediums  for  some  gen- 
uine spirit-mischief,  surrendering  to  their  desire  of 
the  marvellous.  As  I  look  backward,  I  seem  to  dis- 
cover that  my  passions,  my  loves  and  my  despairs, 
instead  of  being  my  enemies,  a  disturbance  and  an 
attack,  became  so  beautiful  that  I  must  be  con- 
stantly alone  to  give  them  my  whole  attention.  I 
notice  that,  for  the  first  time  as  I  run  through 
my  memory,  what  I  saw  when  alone  is  more  vivid 
than  what  I  did  or  saw  in  company. 
A  herd  had  shown  me  a  cave  some  hundred  and 
fifty  feet  below  the  cliff  path  and  a  couple  of  hun- 
dred above  the  sea,  and  told  me  how  an  evicted 
tenant  called  Macrom,  dead  some  fifteen  years,  had 
lived  there  many  years,  and  shown  me  a  rusty  nail 
in  the  rock  which  had  served  perhaps  to  hold  up 
some  wooden  protection  from  wind  and  weather. 
Here  I  stored  a  tin  of  cocoa  and  some  biscuits,  and 
instead  of  going  to  my  bed,  would  slip  out  on  warm 

72 


nights  and  sleep  in  the  cave  on  the  excuse  of  catch- 
ing moths.  One  had  to  pass  over  a  rocky  ledge, 
safe  enough  for  anyone  with  a  fair  head,  yet  seem- 
ing, if  looked  at  from  above,  narrow  and  sloping ; 
and  a  remonstrance  from  a  stranger  who  had  seen 
me  climbing  along  it  doubled  my  delight  in  the  ad- 
venture. When  however,  upon  a  bank  holiday,  I 
found  lovers  in  my  cave,  I  was  not  content  with  it 
again  till  I  heard  of  alarm  among  the  fishing  boats, 
because  the  ghost  of  Macrom  had  been  seen  a  little 
before  the  dawn,  stooping  over  his  fire  in  the  cave- 
mouth.  I  had  been  trying  to  cook  eggs,  as  I  had 
read  in  some  book,  by  burying  them  in  the  earth 
under  a  fire  of  sticks. 

At  other  times,  I  would  sleep  among  the  rhododen- 
drons and  rocks  in  the  wilder  part  of  the  grounds  of 
Howth  Castle.  After  a  while  my  father  said  I  must 
stay  in-doors  half  the  night,  meaning  that  I  should 
get  some  sleep  in  my  bed ;  but  I,  knowing  that  I 
would  be  too  sleepy  and  comfortable  to  get  up 
again,  used  to  sit  over  the  kitchen  fire  till  half  the 
night  was  gone.  Exaggerated  accounts  spread 
through  the  school,  and  sometimes  when  I  did  not 
know  a  lesson  some  master  would  banter  me.  My 
interest  in  science  began  to  fade  away,  and  pres- 
ently I  said  to  myself,  **it  has  all  been  a  misunder- 
standing." I  remembered  how  soon  I  tired  of  my 

73 


v^ 


specimens,  and  how  little  I  knew  after  all  my  years 
of  collecting,  and  I  came  to  believe  that  I  had  gone 
through  so  much  labour  because  of  a  text,  heard  for 
the  first  time  in  St.  John's  Church  in  Sligo.  I 
wanted  to  be  certain  of  my  own  wisdom  by  copying 
Solomon,  who  had  knowledge  of  hyssop  and  of  tree, 
v^-  I  still  carried  my  green  net  but  I  began  to  play  at 
being  a  sage,  a  magician  or  a  poet.  I  had  many 
idols,  and  now  as  I  climbed  along  the  narrow  ledge 
I  was  Manfred  on  his  glacier,  and  now  I  thought  of 
Prince  Athanase  and  his  solitary  lamp,  but  I  soon 
chose  41sstor  for  my  chief  of  men  and  longed  to 
share  his  melancholy,  and  maybe  at  last  to  disap- 
pear from  everybody's  sight  as  he  disappeared 
drifting  in  a  boat  along  some  slow-moving  river 
between  great  trees.  When  I  thought  of  women 
they  were  modelled  on  those  in  my  favourite  poets 
and  loved  in  brief  tragedy,  or,  like  the  girl  in  **The 
Revolt  of  Islam,"  accompanied  their  lovers  through 
all  manner  of  wild  places,  lawless  women  without 
homes  and  without  children. 

XV 

My  father's  influence  upon  my  thoughts  was  at  its 
height.  We  went  to  Dublin  by  train  every  morning, 
breakfasting  in  his  studio.  He  had  taken  a  large 
room  with  a  beautiful  18th  century  mantle-piece 

74 


in  a  York  Street  tenement  house,  and  at  breakfast 
he  read  passages  from  the  poets,  and  always  from 
the  play  or  poem  at  its  most  passionate  moment. 
He  never  read  me  a  passage  because  of  its  specula- 
tive interest,  and  indeed  did  not  care  at  all  for 
poetry  where  there  was  generalisation  or  abstrac- 
tion however  impassioned.  He  would  read  out  the 
first  speeches  of  the  Prometheus  Unbound,  but 
never  the  ecstatic  lyricism  of  that  famous  fourth 
act ;  and  another  day  the  scene  where  Coriolanus 
comes  to  the  house  of  Aufidius  and  tells  the  impu- 
dent servants  that  his  home  is  under  the  canopy.  I 
have  seen  Coriolanus  played  a  number  of  times 
since  then,  and  read  it  more  than  once,  but  that 
scene  is  more  vivid  than  the  rest,  and  it  is  my 
father's  voice  that  I  hear  and  not  Irving's  or  Ben- 
son's. He  did  not  care  even  for  a  fine  lyric  passage 
unless  one  felt  some  actual  man  behind  its  elaboration 
of  beauty,  and  he  was  always  looking  for  the  linea- 
ments of  some  desirable,  familiar  life.  When  the 
spirits  sang  their  scorn  of  Manfred  I  was  to  judge 
by  Manfred's  answer  "O  sweet  and  melancholy 
voices"  that  they  could  not,  even  in  anger,  put  off 
their  spiritual  sweetness.  He  thought  Keats  a 
greater  poet  than  Shelley,  because  less  abstract, 
but  did  not  read  him,  caring  little,  I  think,  for  any 
of  that  most  beautiful  poetry  which  has  come  in 

75 


modem  times  from  the  influence  of  painting.  All 
must  be  an  idealisation  of  speech,  and  at  some  mo- 
ment of  passionate  action  or  somnambulistic  rev- 
V  erie.  I  remember  his  saying  that  all  contemplative 
men  were  in  a  conspiracy  to  overrate  their  state  of 
life,  and  that  all  writers  were  of  them,  excepting 
the  great  poets.  Looking  backwards,  it  seems  to  me 
that  I  saw  his  mind  in  fragments,  which  had  always 
hidden  connections  I  only  now  begin  to  discover. 
He  disliked  the  Victorian  poetry  of  ideas,  and 
Wordsworth  but  for  certain  passages  or  whole 
poems.  He  described  one  morning  over  his  break- 
fast how  in  the  shape  of  the  head  of  a  Words- 
worthian  scholar,  an  old  and  greatly  respected 
clergyman  whose  portrait  he  was  painting,  he  had 
discovered  all  the  animal  instincts  of  a  prize- 
fighter. He  despised  the  formal  beauty  of  Raphael, 
that  calm  which  is  not  an  ordered  passion  but  an 
hypocrisy,  and  attacked  Raphael's  life  for  its  love 
of  pleasure  and  its  self-indulgence.  In  literature 
he  was  always  pre-Raphaelite,  and  carried  into 
literature  principles  that,  while  the  Academy  was 
still  unbroken,  had  made  the  first  attack  upon 
academic  form.  He  no  longer  read  me  anything  for 
its  story,  and  all  our  discussion  was  of  style. 


76 


XVI 

I  began  to  make  blunders  when  I  paid  calls  or 
visits,  and  a  woman  I  had  known  and  liked  as  a 
child  told  me  I  had  changed  for  the  worse.  I  had 
wanted  to  be  wise  and  eloquent,  an  essay  on  the 
younger  Ampere  had  helped  me  to  this  ambition, 
and  when  I  was  alone  I  exaggerated  my  blunders 
and  was  miserable.  I  had  begun  to  write  poetry 
in  imitation  of  Shelley  and  of  Edmund  Spenser, 
play  after  play  —  for  my  father  exalted  dramatic 
poetry  above  all  other  kinds  —  and  I  invented 
fantastic  and  incoherent  plots.  My  lines  but  sel- 
dom scanned,  for  I  could  not  understand  the  pros- 
ody in  the  books,  although  there  were  many  lines 
that  taken  by  themselves  had  music.  I  spoke  them 
slowly  as  I  wrote  and  onlj'-  discovered  when  I  read 
them  to  somebody  else  that  there  was  no  common 
music,  no  prosody.  There  were,  however,  moments 
of  observation  ;  for,  even  when  I  caught  moths  no 
longer,  I  still  noticed  all  that  passed  ;  how  the  little 
moths  came  out  at  sunset,  and  how  after  that  there 
were  only  a  few  big  moths  till  dawn  brought  little 
moths  again  ;  and  what  birds  cried  out  at  night  as  if 
in  their  sleep. 

XVII 

At  Sligo,  where  I  still  went  for  my  holidays,  I  stayed 
with  my  uncle,  George  Pollexfen,  who  had  come 

77 


from  Ballina  to  fill  the  place  of  my  grandfather, 
who  had  retired.  My  grandfather  had  no  longer 
his  big  house,  his  partner  William  Middleton  was 
dead,  and  there  had  been  legal  trouble.  He  was  no 
longer  the  rich  man  he  had  been,  and  his  sons  and 
daughters  were  married  and  scattered.  He  had  a 
tall,  bare  house  overlooking  the  harbour,  and  had 
nothing  to  do  but  work  himself  into  a  rage  if  he 
saw  a  mudlighter  mismanaged  or  judged  from  the 
smoke  of  a  steamer  that  she  was  burning  cheap 
coal,  and  to  superintend  the  making  of  his  tomb. 
There  was  a  Middleton  tomb  and  a  long  list  of 
Middletons  on  the  wall,  and  an  almost  empty  place 
for  Pollexfen  names,  but  he  had  said,  because  there 
was  a  Middleton  there  he  did  not  like,  "I  am  not 
going  to  lie  with  those  old  bones  ; "  and  already  one 
saw  his  name  in  large  gilt  letters  on  the  stone 
fence  of  the  new  tomb.  He  ended  his  walk  at  St. 
John's  churchyard  almost  daily,  for  he  liked  every- 
thing neat  and  compendious  as  upon  shipboard, 
and  if  he  had  not  looked  after  the  tomb  himself  the 
builder  might  have  added  some  useless  ornament. 
He  had,  however,  all  his  old  skill  and  nerve.  I  was 
going  to  Rosses  Point  on  the  little  trading  steamer 
and  saw  him  take  the  wheel  from  the  helmsman 
and  steer  her  through  a  gap  in  the  channel  wall,  and 
across  the  sand,  an  unheard-of-course,  and  at  the 

78 


journey's  end  bring  her  alongside  her  wharf  at 
Rosses  without  the  accustomed  zigzagging  or  pull- 
ing on  a  rope  but  in  a  single  movement.  He  took 
snuff  when  he  had  a  cold,  but  had  never  smoked  or 
taken  alcohol ;  and  when  in  his  eightieth  year  his 
doctor  advised  a  stimulant,  he  replied,  "no,  no,  I 
am  not  going  to  form  a  bad  habit." 
My  brother  had  partly  taken  my  place  in  my  grand- 
mother's affections.  He  had  lived  permanently 
in  her  house  for  some  years  now,  and  went  to  a 
Sligo  school  where  he  was  always  bottom  of  his 
class.  My  grandmother  did  not  mind  that,  for  she 
said,  "he  is  too  kind-hearted  to  pass  the  other 
boys."  He  spent  his  free  hours  going  here  and  there 
with  crowds  of  little  boys,  sons  of  pilots  and  sailors, 
as  their  well-liked  leader,  arranging  donkey  races 
or  driving  donkeys  tandem,  an  occupation  which 
requires  all  one's  intellect  because  of  their  obsti- 
nacy. Besides  he  had  begun  to  amuse  everybody 
with  his  drawings ;  and  in  half  the  pictures  he 
paints  to-day  I  recognise  faces  that  I  have  met  at 
Rosses  or  the  Sligo  quays.  It  is  long  since  he  has 
lived  there,  but  his  memory  seems  as  accurate  as 
the  sight  of  the  eye. 

George  Pollexfen  was  as  patient  as  his  father  was 
impetuous,  and  did  all  by  habit.  A  well-to-do, 
elderly  man,  he  lived  with  no  more  comfort  than 

79 


when  he  had  set  out  as  a  young  man.  He  had  a 
little  house  and  one  old  general  servant  and  a  man 
to  look  after  his  horse,  and  every  year  he  gave  up 
some  activity  and  found  that  there  was  one  more 
food  that  disagreed  with  him.  A  hypochondriac,  he 
passed  from  winter  to  summer  through  a  series  of 
woollens  that  had  always  to  be  weighed ;  for  in 
April  or  May  or  whatever  the  date  was  he  had  to  be 
sure  he  carried  the  exact  number  of  ounces  he  had 
carried  upon  that  date  since  boyhood.  He  lived  in 
despondency,  finding  in  the  most  cheerful  news 
reasons  of  discouragement,  and  sighing  every 
twenty-second  of  June  over  the  shortening  of  the 
days.  Once  in  later  years,  when  I  met  him  in  Dub- 
lin sweating  in  a  midsummer  noon,  I  brought  him 
into  the  hall  of  the  Kildare  Street  Library,  a  cool 
and  shady  place,  without  lightening  his  spirits ; 
for  he  but  said  in  a  melancholy  voice,  "how  very 
cold  this  place  must  be  in  winter  time."  Some- 
times when  I  had  pitted  my  cheerfulness  against 
his  gloom  over  the  breakfast  table,  maintaining 
that  neither  his  talent  nor  his  memory  nor  his 
health  were  running  to  the  dregs,  he  would  rout  me 
with  the  sentence,  "how  very  old  I  shall  be  in 
twenty  years."  Yet  this  inactive  man,  in  whom  the 
sap  of  life  seemed  to  be  dried  away,  had  a  mind  full 
of  pictures.  Nothing  had  ever  happened  to  him  ex- 
o  80 


cept  a  love  affair,  not  I  think  very  passionate,  that 
had  gone  wrong,  and  a  voyage  when  a  young  man. 
My  grandfather  had  sent  him  in  a  schooner  to  a 
port  in  Spain  where  the  shipping  agents  were  two 
Spaniards  called  O'Neill,  descendants  of  Hugh 
O'Neill,  Earl  of  Tyrone,  who  had  fled  from  Ireland 
in  the  reign  of  James  I ;  and  their  Irish  trade  was  a 
last  remnant  of  the  Spanish  trade  that  had  once 
made  Galway  wealthy.  For  some  years  he  and  they 
had  corresponded,  for  they  cherished  the  memory  of 
their  origin.  In  some  Connaught  burying  ground, 
he  had  chanced  upon  the  funeral  of  a  child  with 
but  one  mourner,  a  distinguished  foreign-looking 
man.  It  was  an  Austrian  count  burying  the  last 
of  an  Irish  family,  long  nobles  of  Austria,  who 
were  always  carried  to  that  half-ruined  burying 
ground. 

My  uncle  had  almost  given  up  hunting  and  was 
soon  to  give  it  up  altogether,  and  he  had  once 
ridden  steeple-chases  and  been,  his  horse-trainer 
said,  the  best  rider  in  Connaught.  He  had  certainly 
great  knowledge  of  horses,  for  I  have  been  told, 
several  counties  away,  that  at  Ballina  he  cured 
horses  by  conjuring.  He  had,  however,  merely 
great  skill  in  diagnosis,  for  the  day  was  still  far  off 
when  he  was  to  give  his  nights  to  astrology  and 
ceremonial  magic.  His  servant,  Mary  Battle,  who 

81 


had  been  with  him  since  he  was  a  young  man,  had 
the  second  sight  and  that,  maybe,  incHned  him  to 
strange  studies.  He  would  tell  how  more  than  once 
when  he  had  brought  home  a  guest  without  giving 
her  notice  he  had  found  the  dinner-table  set  for 
two,  and  one  morning  she  was  about  to  bring  him  a 
clean  shirt,  but  stopped  saying  there  was  blood  on 
the  shirt-front  and  that  she  must  bring  him 
another.  On  his  way  to  his  office  he  fell,  crossing 
over  a  little  wall,  and  cut  himself  and  bled  on  to  the 
linen  where  she  had  seen  the  blood.  In  the  evening, 
she  told  how  surprised  she  had  been  to  find  when 
she  looked  again  that  the  shirt  she  had  thought 
bloody  was  quite  clean.  She  could  neither  read  nor 
write  and  her  mind,  which  answered  his  gloom  with 
its  merriment,  was  rammed  with  every  sort  of  old 
history  and  strange  belief.  Much  of  my  ''Celtic 
Twilight"  is  but  her  daily  speech. 
My  uncle  had  the  respect  of  the  common  people  as 
few  Sligo  men  have  had  it ;  he  would  have  thought 
a  stronger  emotion  an  intrusion  on  his  privacy.  He 
gave  to  all  men  the  respect  due  to  their  station  or 
their  worth  with  an  added  measure  of  ceremony, 
and  kept  among  his  workmen  a  discipline  that  had 
about  it  something  of  a  regiment  or  a  ship,  know- 
ing nothing  of  any  but  personal  authority.  If  a 
carter,  let  us  say,  was  in  fault,  he  would  not  dismiss 

82 


him,  but  send  for  him  and  take  his  whip  away  and 
hang  it  upon  the  wall ;  and  having  reduced  the  of- 
fender, as  it  were,  to  the  ranks  for  certain  months, 
would  restore  him  to  his  post  and  his  whip.  This 
man  of  diligence  and  of  method,  who  had  no  enter- 
prise but  in  contemplation,  and  claimed  that  his 
wealth,  considerable  for  Ireland,  came  from  a 
brother's  or  partner's  talent,  was  the  confidant  of 
my  boyish  freaks  and  reveries.  When  I  said  to  him, 
echoing  some  book  I  had  read,  that  one  never  knew 
a  countryside  till  one  knew  it  at  night,  (though 
nothing  would  have  kept  him  from  his  bed  a  mo- 
ment beyond  the  hour)  he  was  pleased ;  for  he 
loved  natural  things  and  had  learnt  two  cries  of  the 
lapwing,  one  that  drew  them  to  where  he  stood  and 
one  that  made  them  fly  away.  And  he  approved, 
and  arranged  my  meals  conveniently,  when  I  told 
him  I  was  going  to  walk  round  Lough  Gill  and  sleep 
in  a  wood.  I  did  not  tell  him  all  my  object,  for  I  was 
nursing  a  new  ambition.  My  father  had  read  to 
me  some  passage  out  of  "Walden,"  and  I  planned 
to  live  some  day  in  a  cottage  on  a  little  island  called 
Innisfree,  and  Innisfree  was  opposite  Slish  Wood 
where  I  meant  to  sleep. 

I  thoug'it  that  having  conquered  bodily  desire  and 
the  inclination  of  my  mind  towards  women  and 
love,  I  should  live,  as  Thoreau  lived,  seeking  wis- 

83 


/ 


dom.  There  was  a  story  in  the  county  history  of  a 
tree  that  had  once  grown  upon  that  island  guarded 
by  some  terrible  monster  and  borne  the  food  of  the 
gods.  A  young  girl  pined  for  the  fruit  and  told  her 
lover  to  kill  the  monster  and  carry  the  fruit  away. 
He  did  as  he  had  been  told,  but  tasted  the  fruit ; 
and  when  he  reached  the  mainland  where  she  had 
waited  for  him,  was  dying  of  its  powerful  virtue. 
And  from  sorrow  and  from  remorse  she  too  ate  of  it 
and  died.  I  do  not  remember  whether  I  chose  the 
^island  because  of  its  beauty  or  for  the  story's  sake, 
but  I  was  twenty-two  or  three  before  I  gave  up  the 
dream. 

I  set  out  from  Sligo  about  six  in  the  evening,  walk- 
ing slowly,  for  it  was  an  evening  of  great  beauty ; 
but  though  I  was  well  into  Slish  Wood  by  bed-time, 
I  could  not  sleep,  not  from  the  discomfort  of  the 
dry  rock  I  had  chosen  for  my  bed,  but  from  my  fear 
of  the  wood-ranger.  Somebody  had  told  me,  though 
I  do  not  think  it  could  have  been  true,  that  he  went 
his  round  at  some  unknown  hour.  I  kept  going  over 
what  I  should  say  if  I  was  found  and  could  not 
think  of  anything  he  would  believe.  However,  I 
could  watch  my  island  in  the  early  dawn  and  notice 
the  order  of  the  cries  of  the  birds. 
I  came  home  next  day  unimaginably  tired  85 
sleepy,  having  walked  some  thirty  miles  partly  over 

84 


rough  and  boggy  ground.  For  months  afterwards, 
if  I  alluded  to  my  walk,  my  uncle's  general  servant 
(not  Mary  Battle,  who  was  slowly  recovering  from 
an  illness  and  would  not  have  taken  the  liberty) 
would  go  into  fits  of  laughter.  She  believed  I  had 
spend  the  night  in  a  different  fashion  and  had  in- 
vented the  excuse  to  deceive  my  uncle,  and  would 
say  to  my  great  embarrassment,  for  I  was  as  prud- 
ish as  an  old  maid,  "and  you  had  good  right  to  be 
fatigued." 

Once  when  staying  with  my  uncle  at  Rosses  Point 
where  he  went  for  certain  months  of  the  year,  I 
called  upon  a  cousin  towards  midnight  and  asked 
him  to  get  his  yacht  out,  for  I  wanted  to  find  what 
sea  birds  began  to  stir  before  dawn.  He  was  indig- 
nant and  refused ;  but  his  elder  sister  had  over- 
heard me  and  came  to  the  head  of  the  stairs  and 
forbade  him  to  stir,  and  that  so  vexed  him  that 
he  shouted  to  the  kitchen  for  his  sea-boots.  He 
came  with  me  in  great  gloom  for  he  had  people's  re- 
spect, he  declared,  and  nobody  so  far  had  said  that 
he  was  mad  as  they  said  I  was,  and  we  got  a  very 
sleepy  boy  out  of  his  bed  in  the  village  and  set  up  sail. 
We  put  a  trawl  out,  as  he  thought  it  would  restore 
his  character  if  he  caught  some  fish,  but  the  wind 
fell  and  we  were  becalmed.  I  rolled  myself  in  the 
main -sail  and  went  to  sleep  for  I  could  sleep  any- 

85 


where  in  those  days.  I  was  awakened  towards 
dawn  to  see  my  cousin  and  the  boy  turning  out 
their  pockets  for  money  and  to  rummage  in  my  own 
pockets.  A  boat  was  rowing  in  from  Roughley  with 
fish  and  they  wanted  to  buy  some  and  would  pre- 
tend they  had  caught  it,  but  all  our  pockets  were 
empty.  It  was  for  the  poem  that  became  fifteen 
years  afterwards  "The  Shadowy  Waters"  that  I 
had  wanted  the  birds'  cries,  and  it  had  been  full  of 
observation  had  I  been  able  to  write  it  when  I  first 
planned  it.  I  had  found  again  the  windy  light  that 
moved  me  when  a  child.  I  persuaded  myself  that 
I  had  a  passion  for  the  dawn,  and  this  passion, 
though  mainly  histrionic  like  a  child's  play,  an  am- 
bitious game,  had  moments  of  sincerity.  Years 
afterwards  when  I  had  finished  "The  Wanderings 
of  Oisin,"  dissatisfied  with  its  yellow  and  its  dull 
green,  with  all  that  overcharged  colour  inherited 
from  the  romantic  movement,  I  deliberately  re- 
shaped my  style,  deliberately  sought  out  an  im- 
pression as  of  cold  light  and  tumbling  clouds.  I  cast 
off  traditional  metaphors  and  loosened  my  rhythm, 
and  recognizing  that  all  the  criticism  of  life  known 
to  me  was  alien  and  English,  became  as  emotional 
as  possible  but  with  an  emotion  which  I  described 
to  myself  as  cold.  It  is  a  natural  conviction  for  a 
painter's  son  to  believe  that  there  may  be  a  land- 

86 


scape  symbolical  of  some  spiritual  condition  that 
awakens  a  hunger  such  as  cats  feel  for  valerian. 

XVIII 

I  was  writing  a  long  play  on  a  fable  suggested  by 
one  of  my  father's  early  designs.  A  king's  daughter 
loves  a  god  seen  in  the  luminous  sky  above  her  gar- 
den in  childhood,  and  to  be  worthy  of  him  and  put 
away  mortality,  becomes  without  pity  85  commits 
crimes,  and  at  last,  having  made  her  way  to  the 
throne  by  murder,  awaits  the  hour  among  her 
courtiers.  One  by  one  they  become  chilly  and  drop 
dead,  for,  unseen  by  all  but  her,  her  god  is  walking 
through  the  hall.  At  last  he  is  at  her  throne's  foot 
and  she,  her  mind  in  the  garden  once  again,  dies 
babbling  like  a  child. 

XIX 

Once  when  I  was  sailing  with  my  cousin,  the  boy 
who  was  our  crew  talked  of  a  music-hall  at  a  neigh- 
bouring seaport,  and  how  the  girls  there  gave  them- 
selves to  men,  and  his  language  was  as  extrava- 
gant as  though  he  praised  that  courtezan  after 
whom  they  named  a  city  or  the  queen  of  Sheba 
herself.  Another  day  he  wanted  my  cousin  to  sail 
some  fifty  miles  along  the  coast  and  put  in  near 
some  cottages  where  he  had  heard  there  were  girls 

87 


*'and  we  would  have  a  great  welcome  before  us." 
He  pleaded  with  excitement  (I  imagine  that  his 
eyes  shone)  but  hardly  hoped  to  persuade  us,  and 
perhaps  but  played  with  fabulous  images  of  life  and 
of  sex.  A  young  jockey  and  horse-trainer,  who  had 
trained  some  horses  for  my  uncle,  once  talked  to  me 
of  wicked  England  while  we  cooked  a  turkey  for  our 
Christmas  dinner  making  it  twist  about  on  a  string 
in  front  of  his  harness-room  fire.  He  had  met  two 
lords  in  England  where  he  had  gone  racing,  who 
"always  exchanged  wives  when  they  went  to  the 
Continent  for  a  holiday."  He  himself  had  once 
been  led  into  temptation  and  was  going  home  with 
a  woman,  but  having  touched  his  scapular  by 
chance,  saw  in  a  moment  an  angel  waving  white 
wings  in  the  air.  Presently  I  was  to  meet  him  no 
more  and  my  uncle  said  he  had  done  something  dis- 
graceful about  a  horse. 

XX 

I  was  climbing  up  a  hill  at  Howth  when  I  heard 
wheels  behind  me  and  a  pony-carriage  drew  up  be- 
side me.  A  pretty  girl  was  driving  alone  and  with- 
out a  hat.  She  told  me  her  name  and  said  we  had 
friends  in  common  and  asked  me  to  ride  beside  her. 
After  that  I  saw  a  great  deal  of  her  and  was  soon  in 
love.  I  did  not  tell  her  I  was  in  love,  however,  be- 

88 


cause  she  was  engaged.  She  had  chosen  me  for  her 
confidant  and  I  learned  all  about  her  quarrels  with 
her  lover.  Several  times  he  broke  the  engagement 
off,  and  she  would  fall  ill,  and  friends  would  make 
peace.  Sometimes  she  would  write  to  him  three 
times  a  day,  but  she  could  not  do  without  a  confi- 
dant. She  was  a  wild  creature,  a  fine  mimic  and 
given  to  bursts  of  religion.  I  have  known  her  to 
weep  at  a  sermon,  call  herself  a  sinful  woman,  and 
mimic  it  after.  I  wrote  her  some  bad  poems  and  had 
more  than  one  sleepless  night  through  anger  with 
her  betrothed. 

XXI 

At  Ballisodare  an  event  happened  that  brought  me 
back  to  the  superstitions  of  my  childhood.  I  do  not 
know  when  it  was,  for  the  events  of  this  period  have 
as  little  sequence  as  those  of  childhood.  I  was  stay- 
ing with  cousins  at  Avena  house,  a  young  man  a  few 
years  older  and  a  girl  of  my  own  age  and  perhaps 
her  sister  who  was  a  good  deal  older.  My  girl  cousin 
had  often  told  me  of  strange  sights  she  had  seen  at 
Ballisodare  or  Rosses.  An  old  woman  three  or  four 
feet  in  height  and  leaning  on  a  stick  had  once  come 
to  the  window  and  looked  in  at  her,  and  sometimes 
she  would  meet  people  on  the  road  who  would  say 
"how  is  so-and-so,"  naming  some  member  of  her 
family,  and  she  would  know,  though  she  could  not 

89 


explain  how,  that  they  were  not  people  of  this 
world.  Once  she  had  lost  her  way  in  a  familiar  field, 
and  when  she  found  it  again  the  silver  mounting 
on  a  walking-stick  belonging  to  her  brother  which 
she  carried  had  vanished.  An  old  woman  in  the 
village  said  afterwards  "you  have  good  friends 
amongst  them,  and  the  silver  was  taken  instead  of 
you." 

Though  it  was  all  years  ago,  what  I  am  going  to  tell 
now  must  be  accurate,  for  no  great  while  ago  she 
wrote  out  her  unprompted  memory  of  it  all  and  it 
was  the  same  as  mine.  She  was  sitting  under  an 
old-fashioned  mirror  reading  and  I  was  reading  in 
another  part  of  the  room.  Suddenly  I  heard  a 
sound  as  if  somebody  was  throwing  a  shower  of  peas 
at  the  mirror.  I  got  her  to  go  into  the  next  room 
and  rap  with  her  knuckles  on  the  other  side  of  the 
wall  to  see  if  the  sound  could  come  from  there,  and 
while  I  was  alone  a  great  thump  came  close  to  my 
head  upon  the  wainscot  and  on  a  different  wall  of 
the  room.  Later  in  the  day  a  servant  heard  a  heavy 
footstep  going  through  the  empty  house,  and  that 
night,  when  I  and  my  two  cousins  went  for  a  walk, 
she  saw  the  ground  under  some  trees  all  in  a  blaze 
of  light.  I  saw  nothing,  but  presently  we  crossed 
the  river  and  went  along  its  edge  where,  they  say, 
there  was  a  village  destroyed,  I  think  in  the  wars  of 

90 


the  17th  century,  and  near  an  old  grave-yard. 
Suddenly  we  all  saw  light  moving  over  the  river 
where  there  is  a  great  rush  of  waters.  It  was  like  a 
very  brilliant  torch.  A  moment  later  the  girl  saw  a 
man  coming  towards  us  who  disappeared  in  the 
water.  I  kept  asking  myself  if  I  could  be  deceived. 
Perhaps  after  all,  though  it  seemed  impossible, 
somebody  was  walking  in  the  water  with  a  torch. 
But  we  could  see  a  small  light  low  down  on  Knock- 
na-rea  seven  miles  off,  and  it  began  to  move  upward 
over  the  mountain  slope.  I  timed  it  on  my  watch 
and  in  five  minutes  it  reached  the  summit,  and  I, 
who  had  often  climbed  the  mountain,  knew  that 
no  human  footstep  was  so  speedy. 
From  that  on  I  wandered  about  raths  and  faery  hills 
and  questioned  old  women  and  old  men  and,  when 
I  was  tired  out  or  unhappy,  began  to  long  for  some 
such  end  as  True  Thomas  found.  I  did  not  believe 
with  my  intellect  that  you  could  be  carried  away 
body  and  soul,  but  I  believed  with  my  emotions  and 
the  belief  of  the  country  people  made  that  easy. 
Once  when  I  had  crawled  into  the  stone  passage  in 
some  rath  of  the  third  Rosses,  the  pilot  who  had 
come  with  me  called  down  the  passage :  "are  you 
all  right,  sir?" 

And  one  night  as  I  came  near  the  village  of  Rosses 
on  the  road  from  Sligo,  a  fire  blazed  up  on  a  green 

91 


bank  at  my  right  side  seven  or  eight  feet  above  me, 
and  another  fire  suddenly  answered  from  Knock- 
na-rea.  I  hurried  on  doubting,  and  yet  hardly 
doubting  in  my  heart  that  I  saw  again  the  fires  that 
I  had  seen  by  the  river  at  Ballisodare.  I  began  oc- 
casionally telling  people  that  one  should  believe 
whatever  had  been  believed  in  all  countries  and 
periods,  and  only  reject  any  part  of  it  after  much 
evidence,  instead  of  starting  all  over  afresh  and 
only  believing  what  one  could  prove.  But  I  was  al- 
ways ready  to  deny  or  turn  into  a  joke  what  was 
for  all  that  my  secret  fanaticism.  When  I  had 
read  Darwin  and  Huxley  and  believed  as  they  did, 
I  had  wanted,  because  an  established  authority  was 
upon  my  side,  to  argue  with  everybody. 

XXII 

I  no  longer  went  to  the  Harcourt  Street  school  and 
we  had  moved  from  Howth  to  Rathgar.  I  was  at 
the  Arts  schools  in  Kildare  Street,  but  my  father, 
who  came  to  the  school  now  and  then,  was  my 
teacher.  The  masters  left  me  alone,  for  they  liked  a 
very  smooth  surface  and  a  very  neat  outline,  and 
indeed  understood  nothing  but  neatness  and 
smoothness.  A  drawing  of  the  Discobolus,  after  my 
father  had  touched  it,  making  the  shoulder  stand 
out  with  swift  and  broken  lines,  had  no  meaning 

92 


for  them ;  and  for  the  most  part  I  exaggerated  all 
that  my  father  did.  Sometimes  indeed,  out  of  ri- 
valry to  some  student  near,  I  too  would  try  to  be 
smooth  and  neat.  One  day  I  helped  the  student 
next  me,  who  certainly  had  no  artistic  gifts,  to 
make  a  drawing  of  some  plaster  fruit.  In  his  grati- 
tude he  told  me  his  history.  "  I  don't  care  for  art,'* 
he  said.  "  I  am  a  good  billiard  player,  one  of  the  best 
in  Dublin  ;  but  my  guardian  said  I  must  take  a  pro- 
fession, so  I  asked  my  friends  to  tell  me  where  I 
would  not  have  to  pass  an  examination,  and  here  I 
am."  It  may  be  that  I  myself  was  there  for  no  better 
reason.  My  father  had  wanted  me  to  go  to  Trinity 
College  and,  when  I  would  not,  had  said,  '*my 
father  and  grandfather  and  great-grandfather  have 
been  there."  I  did  not  tell  him  my  reason  was  that 
I  did  not  believe  my  classics  or  my  mathematics 
good  enough  for  any  examination. 
I  had  for  fellow-student  an  unhappy  "village  gen- 
ius" sent  to  Dublin  by  some  charitable  Connaught 
landlord.  He  painted  religious  pictures  upon  sheets 
nailed  to  the  wall  of  his  bedroom,  a  "Last  Judg- 
ment" among  the  rest.  Then  there  was  a  wild 
young  man  who  would  come  to  school  of  a  morning 
with  a  daisy-chain  hung  round  his  neck ;  and 
George  Russel,  "iE,"  the  poet,  and  mystic.  He 
did  not  paint  the  model  as  we  tried  to,  for  some 

93 


other  image  rose  always  before  his  eyes  (a  St.  John 
in  the  Desert  I  remember,)  and  already  he  spoke  to 
us  of  his  visions.  His  conversation,  so  lucid  and 
vehement  to-day,  was  all  but  incomprehensible, 
though  now  and  again  some  phrase  would  be  under- 
stood and  repeated.  One  day  he  announced  that  he 
was  leaving  the  Art  schools  because  his  will  was 
weak  and  the  arts  or  any  other  emotional  pursuit 
could  but  weaken  it  further. 

Presently  I  went  to  the  modelling  class  to  be  with 
certain  elder  students  who  had  authority  among  us. 
Among  these  were  John  Hughes  and  Oliver  Shep- 
pard,  well-known  now  as  Irish  sculptors.  The  day 
I  first  went  into  the  studio  where  they  worked,  I 
stood  still  upon  the  threshold  in  amazement.  A 
pretty  gentle-looking  girl  was  modelling  in  the 
middle  of  the  room,  and  all  the  men  were  swearing 
at  her  for  getting  in  their  light  with  the  most  violent 
and  fantastic  oaths,  and  calling  her  every  sort  of 
name,  and  through  it  all  she  worked  in  undisturbed 
diligence.  Presently  the  man  nearest  me  saw  my 
face  and  called  out,  "  she  is  stone  deaf,  so  we  always 
swear  at  her  and  call  her  names  when  she  gets  in  our 
light."  In  reality  I  soon  found  that  everyone  was 
kind  to  her,  carrying  her  drawing-boards  and  the 
like,  and  putting  her  into  the  tram  at  the  day's  end. 
We  had  no  scholarship,  no  critical  knowledge  of  the 

94 


history  of  painting,  and  no  settled  standards.  A 
student  would  show  his  fellows  some  French  illus- 
trated paper  that  we  might  all  admire,  now  some 
statue  by  Rodin  or  Dalou  and  now  some  declama- 
tory Parisian  monument,  and  if  I  did  not  happen 
to  have  discussed  the  matter  with  my  father  I 
would  admire  with  no  more  discrimination  than 
the  rest.  That  pretentious  monument  to  Gambetta 
made  a  great  stir  among  us.  No  influence  touched 
us  but  that  of  France,  where  one  or  two  of  the  older 
students  had  been  already  and  all  hoped  to  go.  Of 
England  I  alone  knew  anything.  Our  ablest  stu- 
dent had  learnt  Italian  to  read  Dante,  but  had 
never  heard  of  Tennyson  or  Browning,  and  it  was  I 
who  carried  into  the  school  some  knowledge  of  Eng- 
lish poetry,  especially  of  Browning  who  had  be- 
gun to  move  me  by  his  air  of  wisdom.  I  do  not  be- 
lieve that  I  worked  well,  for  I  wrote  a  great  deal  and 
that  tired  me,  and  the  work  I  was  set  to  bored  me. 
When  alone  and  uninfluenced,  I  longed  for  pattern, 
for  pre-Raphaelitism,  for  an  art  allied  to  poetry, 
and  returned  again  and  again  to  our  National 
Gallery  to  gaze  at  Turner's  Golden  Bough.  Yet  I 
was  too  timid,  had  I  known  how,  to  break  away 
from  my  father's  style  and  the  style  of  those  about 
me.  I  was  always  hoping  that  my  father  would  re- 
turn to  the  style  of  his  youth,  and  make  pictures 

95 


out  of  certain  designs  now  lost,  that  one  could  still 
find  in  his  portfolios.  There  was  one  of  an  old 
hunchback  in  vague  medieval  dress,  going  through 
some  underground  place  where  there  are  beds  with 
people  in  the  beds ;  a  girl  half  rising  from  one  has 
seized  his  hand  and  is  kissing  it.  I  have  forgotten 
its  story,  but  the  strange  old  man  and  the  intensity 
in  the  girl's  figure  are  vivid  as  in  my  childhood. 
There  is  some  passage,  I  believe  in  the  Bible,  about 
a  man  who  saved  a  city  and  went  away  and  was 
never  heard  of  again  and  here  he  was  in  another 
design,  an  old  ragged  beggar  in  the  market-place 
laughing  at  his  own  statue.  But  my  father  would 
say :  "I  must  paint  what  I  see  in  front  of  me.  Of 
course  I  shall  really  paint  something  different  be- 
cause my  nature  will  come  in  unconsciously." 
Sometimes  I  would  try  to  argue  with  him,  for  I  had 
come  to  think  the  philosophy  of  his  fellow-artists 
and  himself  a  misunderstanding  created  by  Vic- 
torian science,  and  science  I  had  grown  to  hate  with 
a  monkish  hate ;  but  no  good  came  of  it,  and  in  a 
moment  I  would  unsay  what  I  had  said  and  pretend 
that  I  did  not  really  believe  it.  My  father  was 
painting  many  fine  portraits,  Dublin  leaders  of  the 
bar,  college  notabilities,  or  chance  comers  whom  he 
would  paint  for  nothing  if  he  liked  their  heads  ;  but 
all  displeased  me.  In  my  heart  I  thought  that  only 

96 


beautiful  things  should  be  painted,  and  that  only 
ancient  things  and  the  stuff  of  dreams  were  beau- 
tiful. And  I  almost  quarrelled  with  my  father 
when  he  made  a  large  water-colour,  one  of  his 
finest  pictures  and  now  lost,  of  a  consumptive 
beggar  girl.  And  a  picture  at  the  Hibernian  Acad- 
emy of  cocottes  with  yellow  faces  sitting  before  a 
cafe  by  some  follower  of  Manet's  made  me  miser- 
able for  days,  but  I  was  happy  when  partly  through 
my  father's  planning  some  Whistlers  were  brought 
over  and  exhibited,  and  did  not  agree  when  my 
father  said:  "imagine  making  your  old  mother 
an  arrangement  in  gray !"  I  did  not  care  for  mere 
reality  and  believed  that  creation  should  be  con- 
scious, and  yet  I  could  only  imitate  my  father.  I 
could  not  compose  anything  but  a  portrait  and  even 
to-day  I  constantly  see  people  as  a  portrait  painter, 
posing  them  in  the  mind's  eye  before  such  and  such 
a  background.  Meanwhile  I  was  still  very  much 
of  a  child,  sometimes  drawing  with  an  elaborate 
frenzy,  simulating  what  I  believed  of  inspiration 
and  sometimes  walking  with  an  artificial  stride  in 
memory  of  Hamlet  and  stopping  at  shop  windows 
to  look  at  my  tie  gathered  into  a  loose  sailor-knot 
and  to  regret  that  it  could  not  be  always  blown 
out  by  the  wind  like  Byron's  tie  in  the  picture.  I  had 
as  many  ideas  as  I  have  now,  only  I  did  not  know 

97 


how  to  choose  from  among  them  those  that  be- 
longed to  my  Hfe. 

XXIII 

We  Hved  in  a  villa  where  the  red  bricks  were  made 
pretentious  and  vulgar  with  streaks  of  slate  colour, 
and  there  seemed  to  be  enemies  everywhere.  At  one 
side  indeed  there  was  a  friendly  architect,  but  on 
the  other  some  stupid  stout  woman  and  her  family. 
I  had  a  study  with  a  window  opposite  some  window 
of  hers,  &  one  night  when  I  was  writing  I  heard 
voices  full  of  derision  and  saw  the  stout  woman  and 
her  family  standing  in  the  window.  I  have  a  way  of 
acting  what  I  write  and  speaking  it  aloud  without 
knowing  what  I  am  doing.  Perhaps  I  was  on  my 
hands  and  knees,  or  looking  down  over  the  back  of 
a  chair  talking  into  what  I  imagined  an  abyss.  An- 
other day  a  woman  asked  me  to  direct  her  on  her 
way  and  while  I  was  hesitating,  being  so  suddenly 
called  out  of  my  thought,  a  woman  from  some 
neighbouring  house  came  by.  She  said  I  was  a  poet 
and  my  questioner  turned  away  contemptuously. 
Upon  the  other  hand,  the  policeman  and  tramway 
conductor  thought  my  absence  of  mind  sufficiently 
explained  when  our  servant  told  them  I  was  a  poet. 
**Oh  well,"  said  the  policeman,  who  had  been  ask- 
ing why  I  went  indifferently  through  clean  and 
muddy  places,  '*if  it  is  only  the  poetry  that  is  work- 

98 


ing  in  his  head!"  I  imagine  I  looked  gaunt  and 
emaciated,  for  the  little  boys  at  the  neighbouring 
cross-road  used  to  say  when  I  passed  by  :  "  Oh,  here 
is  King  Death  again."  One  morning  when  my 
father  was  on  the  way  to  his  studio,  he  met  his  land- 
lord who  had  a  big  grocer's  shop  and  they  had  this 
conversation  :  "will  you  tell  me,  sir,  if  you  think 
Tennyson  should  have  been  given  that  peerage?" 
"one's  only  doubt  is  if  he  should  have  accepted  it : 
it  was  a  finer  thing  to  be  Alfred  Tennyson."  There 
was  a  silence,  and  then:  "well,  all  the  people  I 
know  think  he  should  not  have  got  it."  Then, 
spitefully  :  "what's  the  good  of  poetry?"  "Oh,  it 
gives  our  minds  a  great  deal  of  pleasure."  "But 
wouldn't  it  have  given  your  mind  more  pleasure  if 
he  had  written  an  improving  book?"  "Oh,  in  that 
case  I  should  not  have  read  it."  My  father  returned 
in  the  evening  delighted  with  his  story,  but  I  could 
not  understand  how  he  could  take  such  opinions 
lightly  and  not  have  seriously  argued  with  the  man. 
None  of  these  people  had  ever  seen  any  poet  but  an 
old  white-haired  man  who  had  written  volumes  of 
easy,  too-honied  verse,  and  run  through  his  money 
and  gone  clean  out  of  his  mind.  He  was  a  common 
figure  in  the  streets  and  lived  in  some  shabby  neigh- 
bourhood of  tenement  houses  where  there  were 
hens  and  chickens  among  the  cobble  stones.  Every 

99 


morning  he  carried  home  a  loaf  and  gave  half  of  it 
to  the  hens  and  chickens,  the  birds,  or  to  some  dog 
or  starving  cat.  He  was  known  to  live  in  one  room 
with  a  nail  in  the  middle  of  the  ceiling  from  which 
innumerable  cords  were  stretched  to  other  nails  in 
the  walls.  In  this  way  he  kept  up  the  illusion  that 
he  was  living  under  canvas  in  some  Arabian  desert. 
I  could  not  escape  like  this  old  man  from  house 
and  neighbourhood,  but  hated  both,  hearing  every 
whisper,  noticing  every  passing  glance. 
When  my  grandfather  came  for  a  few  days  to  see  a 
doctor,  I  was  shocked  to  see  him  in  our  house.  My 
father  read  out  to  him  in  the  evening  Clark  Rus- 
sell's "Wreck  of  the  Grosvenor;"  but  the  doctor 
forbade  it,  for  my  grandfather  got  up  in  the  middle 
of  the  night  and  acted  through  the  mutiny,  as  I 
acted  my  verse,  saying  the  while,  **yes,  yes,  that  is 
the  way  it  would  all  happen." 

XXIV 

From  our  first  arrival  in  Dublin,  my  father  had 
brought  me  from  time  to  time  to  see  Edward  Dow- 
den.  He  and  my  father  had  been  college  friends  and 
were  trying,  perhaps,  to  take  up  again  their  old 
friendship.  Sometimes  we  were  asked  to  breakfast, 
and  afterwards  my  father  would  tell  me  to  read  out 
one  of  my  poems.  Dowden  was  wise  in  his  encour- 


agement,  never  overpraising  and  never  unsympa- 
thetic, and  he  would  sometimes  lend  me  books. 
The  orderly,  prosperous  house  where  all  was  in 
good  taste,  where  poetry  was  rightly  valued,  made 
Dublin  tolerable  for  a  while,  and  for  perhaps  a 
couple  of  years  he  was  an  image  of  romance.  My 
father  would  not  share  my  enthusiasm  and  soon, 
I  noticed,  grew  impatient  at  these  meetings.  He 
would  sometimes  say  that  he  had  wanted  Dowden 
when  they  were  young  to  give  himself  to  creative 
art,  and  would  talk  of  what  he  considered  Dowden's 
failure  in  life.  I  know  now  that  he  was  finding  in  his 
friend  what  he  himself  had  been  saved  from  by  the 
conversation  of  the  pre-Raphaelites.  "He  will  not 
trust  his  nature,"  he  would  say,  or  "he  is  too  much 
influenced  by  his  inferiors,"  or  he  would  praise  "  Re- 
nunciants,"  one  of  Dowden's  poems,  to  prove  what 
Dowden  might  have  written.  I  was  not  influenced 
for  I  had  imagined  a  past  worthy  of  that  dark,  ro- 
mantic face.  I  took  literally  his  verses,  touched 
here  and  there  with  Swinburnian  rhetoric,  and  be- 
lieved that  he  had  loved,  unhappily  and  illicitly; 
and  when  through  the  practice  of  my  art  I  dis- 
covered that  certain  images  about  the  love  of  woman 
were  the  properties  of  a  school,  I  but  changed  my 
fancy  and  thought  of  him  as  very  wise. 
I  was  constantly  troubled  about  philosophic  ques- 

101 


tions.  I  would  say  to  my  fellow  students  at  the  Art 
school,  "poetry  and  sculpture  exist  to  keep  our 
passions  alive;"  and  somebody  would  say,  "we 
would  be  much  better  without  our  passions."  Or  I 
would  have  a  week's  anxiety  over  the  problem  :  do 
the  arts  make  us  happier,  or  more  sensitive  and 
therefore  more  unhappy.  And  I  would  say  to 
Hughes  or  Sheppard,  "if  I  cannot  be  certain  they 
make  us  happier  I  will  never  write  again."  If  I 
spoke  of  these  things  to  Dowden  he  would  put 
the  question  away  with  good-humoured  irony :  he 
seemed  to  condescend  to  everybody  and  every- 
thing and  was  now  my  sage.  I  was  about  to  learn 
that  if  a  man  is  to  write  lyric  poetry  he  must  be 
shaped  by  nature  and  art  to  some  one  out  of  half-a- 
dozen  traditional  poses,  and  be  lover  or  saint,  sage 
or  sensualist,  or  mere  mocker  of  all  life ;  and  that 
none  but  that  stroke  of  luckless  luck  can  open  be- 
fore him  the  accumulated  expression  of  the  world. 
And  this  thought  before  it  could  be  knowledge  was 
an  instinct. 

I  was  vexed  when  my  father  called  Dowden's  irony 
timidity,  but  after  many  years  his  impression  has 
not  changed  for  he  wrote  to  me  but  a  few  months 
ago,  "it  was  like  talking  to  a  priest.  One  had  to  be 
careful  not  to  remind  him  of  his  sacrifice."  Once 
after  breakfast  Dowden  read  us  some  chapters  of 

102 


the  unpublished  "Life  of  Shelley,"  and  I  who  had 
made  the  "Prometheus  Unbound"  my  sacred  book 
was  delighted  with  all  he  read.  I  was  chilled,  how- 
ever, when  he  explained  that  he  had  lost  his  liking 
for  Shelley  and  would  not  have  written  it  but  for  an 
old  promise  to  the  Shelley  family.  When  it  was 
published,  Matthew  Arnold  made  sport  of  certain 
conventionalities  and  extravagances  that  were,  my 
father  and  I  had  come  to  see,  the  violence  or  clumsi- 
ness of  a  conscientious  man  hiding  from  himself  a 
lack  of  sympathy.  He  had  abandoned  too,  or  was 
about  to  abandon,  what  was  to  have  been  his 
master-work,  "The  Life  of  Goethe,"  though  in  his 
youth  a  lecture  course  at  Alexandra  College  that 
spoke  too  openly  of  Goethe's  loves  had  brought 
upon  him  the  displeasure  of  our  Protestant  Arch- 
bishop of  Dublin.  Only  Wordsworth,  he  said,  kept, 
more  than  all,  his  early  love. 

Though  my  faith  was  shaken,  it  was  only  when  he 
urged  me  to  read  George  Eliot  that  I  became  angry 
and  disillusioned  &  worked  myself  into  a  quarrel  or 
half-quarrel.  I  had  read  all  Victor  Hugo's  romances 
and  a  couple  of  Balzac's  and  was  in  no  mind  to  like 
her.  She  seemed  to  have  a  distrust  or  a  distaste  for 
all  in  life  that  gives  one  a  springing  foot.  Then  too 
she  knew  so  well  how  to  enforce  her  distaste  by  the 
authority  of  her  mid-Victorian  science  or  by  some 

103 


habit  of  mind  of  its  breeding,  that  I,  who  had  not 
escaped  the  fascination  of  what  I  loathed,  doubted 
while  the  book  lay  open  whatsoever  my  instinct 
knew  of  splendour.  She  disturbed  me  and  alarmed 
me,  but  when  I  spoke  of  her  to  my  father,  he  threw 
her  aside  with  a  phrase,  "Oh,  she  was  an  ugly 
woman  who  hated  handsome  men  and  handsome 
women;"  and  he  began  to  praise  "Wuthering 
Heights." 

Only  the  other  day,  when  I  got  Dowden's  letters, 
did  I  discover  for  how  many  years  the  friendship 
between  Dowden  and  my  father  had  been  an  antag- 
onism. My  father  had  written  from  Fitzroy  Road 
in  the  sixties  that  the  brotherhood,  by  which  he 
meant  the  poet  Edwin  Ellis,  Nettleship  and  him- 
self, "abhorred  Wordsworth;"  and  Dowden,  not 
remembering  that  another  week  would  bring  a  dif- 
ferent mood  and  abhorrence,  had  written  a  pained 
and  solemn  letter.  My  father  had  answered  that 
Dowden  believed  too  much  in  the  intellect  and  that 
all  valuable  education  was  but  a  stirring  up  of  the 
emotions  and  had  added  that  this  did  not  mean  ex- 
citability. "In  the  completely  emotional  man,"  he 
wrote,  "  the  least  awakening  of  feeling  is  a  harmony 
in  which  every  chord  of  every  feeling  vibrates. 
Excitement  is  the  feature  of  an  insufficiently  emo- 
tional nature,  the  harsh  vibrating  discourse  of  but 

104 


one  or  two  chords."  Living  in  a  free  world  ac- 
customed to  the  gay  exaggeration  of  the  talk  of 
equals,  of  men  who  talk  and  write  to  discover  truth 
and  not  for  popular  instruction,  he  had  already, 
when  both  men  were  in  their  twenties,  decided  it  is 
plain  that  Dowden  was  a  Provincial. 

XXV 

It  was  only  when  I  began  to  study  psychical  re- 
search and  mystical  philosophy  that  I  broke  away 
from  my  father's  influence.  He  had  been  a  follower 
of  John  Stuart  Mill  and  had  grown  to  manhood 
with  the  scientific  movement.  In  this  he  had  never 
been  of  Rossetti's  party  who  said  that  it  mattered 
to  nobody  whether  the  sun  went  round  the  earth 
or  the  earth  round  the  sun.  But  through  this  new 
research,  this  reaction  from  popular  science,  I  had 
begun  to  feel  that  I  had  allies  for  my  secret  thought. 
Once  when  I  was  in  Dowden's  drawing-room  a  ser- 
vant announced  my  late  head-master.  I  must  have 
got  pale  or  red,  for  Dowden,  with  some  ironical, 
friendly  remark,  brought  me  into  another  room  and 
there  I  stayed  until  the  visitor  was  gone.  A  few 
months  later,  when  I  met  the  head-master  again  I 
had  more  courage.  We  chanced  upon  one  another 
in  the  street  and  he  said,  "I  want  you  to  use  your 
influence  with  so-and-so,  for  he  is  giving  all  his  time 

105 


to  some  sort  of  mysticism  and  he  will  fail  in  his  ex- 
amination." I  was  in  great  alarm,  but  I  managed  to 
say  something  about  the  children  of  this  world 
being  wiser  than  the  children  of  light.  He  went  off 
with  a  brusque  *'good  morning."  I  do  not  think 
that  even  at  that  age  I  would  have  been  so  grandilo- 
quent but  for  my  alarm.  He  had,  however,  aroused 
all  my  indignation. 

My  new  allies  and  my  old  had  alike  sustained  me. 
*' Intermediate  examinations,"  which  I  had  always 
refused,  meant  money  for  pupil  and  for  teacher,  and 
that  alone.  My  father  had  brought  me  up  never 
when  at  school  to  think  of  the  future  or  of  any  prac- 
tical result.  I  have  even  known  him  to  say,  "when  I 
was  young,  the  definition  of  a  gentleman  was  a  man 
not  wholly  occupied  in  getting  on."  And  yet  this 
master  wanted  to  withdraw  my  friend  from  the  pur- 
suit of  the  most  important  of  all  the  truths.  My 
friend,  now  in  his  last  year  at  school,  was  a  show  boy, 
and  had  beaten  all  Ireland  again  and  again,  but 
now  he  and  I  were  reading  Baron  Reichenbach  on 
Odic  Force  and  manuals  published  by  the  Theo- 
sophical  Society.  We  spent  a  good  deal  of  time  in 
the  Kildare  Street  Museum  passing  our  hands  over 
the  glass  cases,  feeling  or  believing  we  felt  the  Odic 
Force  flowing  from  the  big  crystals.  We  also  found 
pins  blindfolded  and  read  papers  on  our  discoveries 

106 


to  the  Hermetic  Society  that  met  near  the  roof  in 
York  Street.  I  had,  when  we  first  made  our  society, 
proposed  for  our  consideration  that  whatever  the 
great  poets  had  affirmed  in  their  finest  moments 
was  the  nearest  we  could  come  to  an  authoritative 
reHgion,  and  that  their  mythology,  their  spirits  of 
water  and  wind  were  but  literal  truth.  I  had  read 
"Prometheus  Unbound"  with  this  thought  in  mind 
and  wanted  help  to  carry  my  study  through  all 
literature.  I  was  soon  to  vex  my  father  by  defining 
truth  as  "the  dramatically  appropriate  utterance 
of  the  highest  man."  And  if  I  had  been  asked  to 
define  the  "highest"  man,  I  would  have  said  per- 
haps, "we  can  but  find  him  as  Homer  found  Odys- 
seus when  he  was  looking  for  a  theme." 
My  friend  had  written  to  some  missionary  society 
to  send  him  to  the  South  Seas,  when  I  offered  him 
Renan's  "Life  of  Christ"  and  a  copy  of  "Esoteric 
Buddhism."  He  refused  both,  but  a  few  days  later 
while  reading  for  an  examination  in  Kildare  Street 
Library,  he  asked  in  an  idle  moment  for  "Esoteric 
Buddhism  "  and  came  out  an  esoteric  Buddhist.  He 
wrote  to  the  missionaries  withdrawing  his  letter  and 
offered  himself  to  the  Theosophical  Society  as  a 
chela.  He  was  vexed  now  at  my  lack  of  zeal,  for  I 
had  stayed  somewhere  between  the  books,  held 
there  perhaps  by  my  father's  scepticism.  I  said, 

107 


and  he  thought  it  was  a  great  joke  though  I  was 
serious,  that  even  if  I  were  certain  in  my  own  mind, 
I  did  not  know  "a  single  person  with  a  talent  for 
conviction."  For  a  time  he  made  me  ashamed  of 
my  world  and  its  lack  of  zeal,  and  I  wondered  if  his 
world  (his  father  was  a  notorious  Orange  leader) 
where  everything  was  a  matter  of  belief  was  not  bet- 
ter than  mine.  He  himself  proposed  the  immediate 
conversion  of  the  other  show  boy,  a  clever  little 
fellow,  now  a  Dublin  mathematician  and  still  under 
five  feet.  I  found  him  a  day  later  in  much  depres- 
sion. I   said,   "did  he  refuse  to  listen  to  you?" 
"Not  at  all,"  was  the  answer,  "for  I  had  only  been 
talking  for  a  quarter  of  an  hour  when  he  said  he 
believed."     Certainly    those    minds,    parched    by 
many  examinations,  were  thirsty. 
Sometimes  a  professor  of  Oriental  Languages  at 
Trinity  College,  a  Persian,  came  to  our  Society  and 
talked  of  the  magicians  of  the  East.  When  he  was  a 
little  boy,  he  had  seen  a  vision  in  a  pool  of  ink,  a 
multitude  of  spirits  singing  in  Arabic,  "woe  unto 
those  that  do  not  believe  in  us."  And  we  persuaded 
a  Brahmin  philosopher  to  come  from  London  and 
stay  for  a  few  days  with  the  only  one  among  us  who 
had  rooms  of  his  own.  It  was  my  first  meeting  with 
a  philosophy  that  confirmed  my  vague  speculations 
and  seemed  at  once  logical  and  boundless.  Con- 

108 


sciousness,  he  taught,  does  not  merely  spread  out 
its  surface  but  has,  in  vision  and  in  contemplation,  an- 
other motion  and  can  change  in  height  and  in  depth. 
A  handsome  young  man  with  the  typical  face  of 
Christ,  he  chaffed  me  good-humouredly  because  he 
said  I  came  at  breakfast  and  began  some  question 
that  was  interrupted  by  the  first  caller,  waited  in 
silence  till  ten  or  eleven  at  night  when  the  last  caller 
had  gone,  and  finished  my  question. 

XXVI 

I  thought  a  great  deal  about  the  system  of  education 
from  which  I  had  suffered,  and  believing  that  every- 
body had  a  philosophical  defence  for  all  they  did, 
I  desired  greatly  to  meet  some  school-master  that  I 
might  question  him.  For  a  moment  it  seemed  as  if  I 
should  have  my  desire.  I  had  been  invited  to  read 
out  a  poem  called  "The  Island  of  Statues,"  an  ar- 
cadian play  in  imitation  of  Edmund  Spenser,  to  a 
gathering  of  critics  who  were  to  decide  whether  it 
was  worthy  of  publication  in  the  College  magazine. 
The  magazine  had  already  published  a  lyric  of 
mine,  the  first  ever  printed,  and  people  began  to 
know  my  name.  We  met  in  the  rooms  of  Mr.  C.  H. 
Oldham,  now  professor  of  Political  Economy  at  our 
new  University  ;  and  though  Professor  Bury,  then  a 
very  young  man,  was  to  be  the  deciding  voice,  Mr. 

109 


Oldham  had  asked  quite  a  large  audience.  When 
the  reading  was  over  and  the  poem  had  been  ap- 
proved I  was  left  alone,  why  I  cannot  remember, 
with  a  young  man  who  was,  I  had  been  told,  a 
school-master.  I  was  silent,  gathering  my  courage, 
and  he  also  was  silent ;  and  presently  I  said  without 
anything  to  lead  up  to  it,  "I  know  you  will  defend 
the  ordinary  system  of  education  by  saying  that  it 
strengthens  the  will,  but  I  am  convinced  that  it 
only  seems  to  do  so  because  it  weakens  the  im- 
pulses." Then  I  stopped,  overtaken  by  shyness. 
He  made  no  answer  but  smiled  and  looked  sur- 
prised as  though  I  had  said,  ''you  will  say  they  are 
Persian  attire ;  but  let  them  be  changed." 

XXVII 

I  had  begun  to  frequent  a  club  founded  by  Mr.  Old- 
ham, and  not  from  natural  liking,  but  from  a  secret 
ambition.  I  wished  to  become  self-possessed,  to  be 
able  to  play  with  hostile  minds  as  Hamlet  played, 
to  look  in  the  lion's  face,  as  it  were,  with  unquiver- 
ing  eyelash.  In  Ireland  harsh  argument  which  had 
gone  out  of  fashion  in  England  was  still  the  manner 
of  our  conversation,  and  at  this  club  Unionist  and 
Nationalist  could  interrupt  one  another  and  insult 
one  another  without  the  formal  and  traditional 
restraint  of  public  speech.  Sometimes  they  would 

110 


change  the  subject  &  discuss  Socialism,  or  a  philo- 
sophical question,  merely  to  discover  their  old  pas- 
sions under  a  new  shape.  I  spoke  easily  and  I 
thought  well  till  some  one  was  rude  and  then  I 
would  become  silent  or  exaggerate  my  opinion  to 
absurdity,  or  hesitate  and  grow  confused,  or  be 
carried  away  myself  by  some  party  passion.  I 
would  spend  hours  afterwards  going  over  my  words 
and  putting  the  wrong  ones  right.  Discovering 
that  I  was  only  self-possessed  with  people  I  knew 
intimately,  I  would  often  go  to  a  strange  house 
where  I  knew  I  would  spend  a  wretched  hour  for 
schooling  sake.  I  did  not  discover  that  Hamlet 
had  his  self-possession  from  no  schooling  but  from 
indifference  and  passion  conquering  sweetness,  and 
that  less  heroic  minds  can  but  hope  it  from  old  age. 

XXVIII 

I  had  very  little  money  and  one  day  the  toll-taker  at 
the  metal  bridge  over  the  Liffey  and  a  gossip  of  his 
laughed  when  I  refused  the  halfpenny  and  said  ''no, 
I  will  go  round  by  O'Connell  Bridge."  When  I 
called  for  the  first  time  at  a  house  in  Leinster  Road 
several  middle-aged  women  were  playing  cards  and 
suggested  my  taking  a  hand  and  gave  me  a  glass  of 
sherry.  The  sherry  went  to  my  head  and  I  was  im- 
poverished for  days  by  the  loss  of  sixpence.  My 

111 


hostess  was  Ellen  O'Leary,  who  kept  house  for  her 
brother  John  O'Leary  the  Fenian,  the  handsomest 
old  man  I  had  ever  seen.  He  had  been  condemned 
to  twenty  years  penal  servitude  but  had  been  set 
free  after  five  on  condition  that  he  did  not  return  to 
Ireland  for  fifteen  years.  He  had  said  to  the  govern- 
ment, "I  will  not  return  if  Germany  makes  war  on 
you,  but  I  will  return  if  France  does."  He  and  his 
old  sister  lived  exactly  opposite  the  Orange  leader 
for  whom  he  had  a  great  respect.  His  sister  stirred 
my  affection  at  first  for  no  better  reason  than  her 
likeness  of  face  and  figure  to  the  matron  of  my 
London  school,  a  friendly  person,  but  when  I  came 
to  know  her  I  found  sister  and  brother  alike  were  of 
Plutarch's  people.  She  told  me  of  her  brother's 
life,  how  in  his  youth  as  now  in  his  age,  he  would 
spend  his  afternoons  searching  for  rare  books 
among  second-hand  book-shops,  how  the  Fenian 
organizer  James  Stephens  had  found  him  there  and 
asked  for  his  help.  "I  do  not  think  you  have  any 
chance  of  success,"  he  had  said,  "but  if  you  never 
ask  me  to  enroll  anybody  else  I  will  join,  it  will  be 
very  good  for  the  morals  of  the  country."  She  told 
me  how  it  grew  to  be  a  formidable  movement,  and 
of  the  arrests  that  followed  (I  believe  that  her 
own  sweetheart  had  somehow  fallen  among  the 
wreckage,)  of  sentences  of  death  pronounced  upon 

112 


false  evidence  amid  a  public  panic,  and  told  it  all 
without  bitterness.  No  fanaticism  could  thrive 
amid  such  gentleness.  She  never  found  it  hard  to 
believe  that  an  opponent  had  as  high  a  motive  as 
her  own  and  needed  upon  her  difficult  road  no  spur 
of  hate. 

Her  brother  seemed  very  unlike  on  a  first  hearing 
for  he  had  some  violent  oaths,  "  Good  God  in  Heav- 
en" being  one  of  them;  and  if  he  disliked  any- 
thing one  said  or  did,  he  spoke  all  his  thought,  but 
in  a  little  one  heard  his  justice  match  her  charity. 
"Never  has  there  been  a  cause  so  bad,"  he  would 
say,  ''that  it  has  not  been  defended  by  good  men 
for  good  reasons."  Nor  would  he  overvalue  any 
man  because  they  shared  opinions ;  and  when  he 
lent  me  the  poems  of  Davis  and  the  Young  Ire- 
landers,  of  whom  I  had  known  nothing,  he  did  not, 
although  the  poems  of  Davis  had  made  him  a 
patriot,  claim  that  they  were  very  good  poetry. 
His  room  was  full  of  books,  always  second-hand 
copies  that  had  often  been  ugly  and  badly  printed 
when  new  and  had  not  grown  to  my  unhistoric 
mind  more  pleasing  from  the  dirt  of  some  old  Dub- 
lin book-shop.  Great  numbers  were  Irish,  and  for 
the  first  time  I  began  to  read  histories  and  verses 
that  a  Catholic  Irishman  knows  from  boyhood. 
He  seemed  to  consider  politics  almost  wholly  as  a 
I  113 


/ 


moral  discipline,  and  seldom  said  of  any  proposed 
course  of  action  that  it  was  practical  or  otherwise. 
When  he  spoke  to  me  of  his  prison  life  he  spoke  of 
all  with  seeming  freedom,  but  presently  one  noticed 
that  he  never  spoke  of  hardship  and  if  one  asked 
him  why,  he  would  say,  "  I  was  in  the  hands  of  my 
enemies,  why  should  I  complain?"  I  have  heard 
since  that  the  governor  of  his  jail  found  out  that 
he  had  endured  some  unnecessary  discomfort  for 
months  and  had  asked  why  he  did  not  speak  of  it. 
*'  I  did  not  come  here  to  complain,"  was  the  answer. 
He  had  the  moral  genius  that  moves  all  young 
people  and  moves  them  the  more  if  they  are  re- 
pelled by  those  who  have  strict  opinions  and  yet 
have  lived  commonplace  lives.  I  had  begun,  as 
would  any  other  of  my  training,  to  say  violent  and 
paradoxical  things  to  shock  provincial  sobriety,  and 
Dowden's  ironical  calm  had  come  to  seem  but  a 
professional  pose.  But  here  was  something  as  spon- 
taneous as  the  life  of  an  artist.  Sometimes  he  would 
say  things  that  would  have  sounded  well  in  some 
heroic  Elizabethan  play.  It  became  my  delight  to 
rouse  him  to  these  outbursts  for  I  was  the  poet  in 
the  presence  of  his  theme.  Once  when  I  was  de- 
fending an  Irish  politician  who  had  made  a  great 
outcry  because  he  was  treated  as  a  common  felon, 
by  showing  that  he  did  it  for  the  cause's  sake,  he 

114 


said,  "there  are  things  that  a  man  must  not  do  even 
to  save  a  nation."  He  would  speak  a  sentence  Hke 
that  in  ignorance  of  its  passionate  value,  and  would 
forget  it  the  moment  after. 

I  met  at  his  house  friends  of  later  life,  Katharine 
Tynan  who  still  lived  upon  her  father's  farm,  and 
Dr.  Hyde,  still  a  college  student  who  took  snuff  like 
those  Mayo  county  people,  whose  stories  and  songs 
he  was  writing  down.  "Davitt  wants  followers  by 
the  thousand,"  O'Leary  would  say,  "I  only  want 
half-a-dozen."  One  constant  caller  looked  at  me 
with  much  hostility,  John  F.  Taylor,  an  obscure 
great  orator.  The  other  day  in  Dublin  I  overheard 
a  man  murmuring  to  another  one  of  his  speeches  as 
I  might  some  Elizabethan  lyric  that  is  in  my  very 
bones.  It  was  delivered  at  some  Dublin  debate, 
some  College  society  perhaps.  The  Lord  Chancellor 
had  spoken  with  balanced  unemotional  sentences 
now  self-complacent,  now  in  derision.  Taylor  be- 
gan hesitating  and  stopping  for  words,  but  after 
speaking  very  badly  for  a  little,  straightened  his 
figure  and  spoke  as  out  of  a  dream  :  "I  am  carried 
to  another  age,  a  nobler  court,  and  another  Lord 
Chancellor  is  speaking.  I  am  at  the  court  of  the 
first  Pharaoh."  Thereupon  he  put  into  the  mouth  of 
that  Egyptian  all  his  audience  had  listened  to,  but 
now  it  was  spoken  to  the  children  of  Israel.  "  If  you 

115 


have  any  spirituality  as  you  boast,  why  not  use  our 
great  empire  to  spread  it  through  the  world,  why 
still  cling  to  that  beggarly  nationality  of  yours? 
what  are  its  history  and  its  works  weighed  with 
those  of  Egypt."  Then  his  voice  changed  and  sank  : 
"  I  see  a  man  at  the  edge  of  the  crowd  ;  he  is  stand- 
ing listening  there,  but  he  will  not  obey  ; "  and  then 
with  his  voice  rising  to  a  cry,  **had  he  obeyed  he 
would  never  have  come  down  the  mountain 
carrying  in  his  arms  the  tables  of  the  Law  in  the 
language  of  the  outlaw." 

He  had  been  in  a  linen-draper's  shop  for  a  while, 
had  educated  himself  and  put  himself  to  college, 
and  was  now,  as  a  lawyer,  famous  for  hopeless  cases 
where  unsure  judgment  could  not  make  things 
worse,  and  eloquence,  power  of  cross-examination 
and  learning  might  amend  all.  Conversation  with 
him  was  always  argument,  and  for  an  obstinate 
opponent  he  had  such  phrases  as,  "have  you  your 
head  in  a  bag,  sir?"  and  I  seemed  his  particular 
aversion.  As  with  many  of  the  self-made  men  of 
that  generation,  Carlyle  was  his  chief  literary 
enthusiasm,  supporting  him,  as  he  believed,  in  his 
contempt  for  the  complexities  and  refinements 
he  had  not  found  in  his  hard  life,  and  I  belonged  to 
a  generation  that  had  begun  to  call  Carlyle  rheto- 
rician and  demagogue.  I  had  once  seen  what  I  had 

116 


believed  to  be  an  enraged  bull  in  a  field  and  had 
walked  up  to  it  as  a  test  of  courage  to  discover,  just 
as  panic  fell  upon  me,  that  it  was  merely  an  irritable 
cow.  I  braved  Taylor  again  and  again,  but  always 
found  him  worse  than  my  expectation.  I  would 
say,  quoting  Mill,  "oratory  is  heard,  poetry  is  over- 
heard." And  he  would  answer,  his  voice  full  of  con- 
tempt, that  there  was  always  an  audience  ;  and  yet, 
in  his  moments  of  lofty  speech,  he  himself  was  alone 
no  matter  what  the  crowd. 

At  other  times  his  science  or  his  Catholic  ortho- 
doxy, I  never  could  discover  which,  would  become 
enraged  with  my  supernaturalism.  I  can  but  once 
remember  escaping  him  unabashed  and  uncon- 
quered.  I  said  with  deliberate  exaggeration  at  some 
evening  party  at  O'Leary's  **five  out  of  every  six 
people  have  seen  a  ghost ;"  and  Taylor  fell  into  my 
net  with  ''well,  I  will  ask  everybody  here."  I  man- 
aged that  the  first  answer  should  come  from  a  man 
who  had  heard  a  voice  he  believed  to  be  that  of  his 
dead  brother,  and  the  second  from  a  doctor's  wife 
who  had  lived  in  a  haunted  house  and  met  a  man 
with  his  throat  cut,  whose  throat  as  he  drifted  along 
the  garden-walk  "had  opened  and  closed  like  the 
mouth  of  a  fish."  Taylor  threw  up  his  head  like  an 
angry  horse,  but  asked  no  further  question,  and  did 
not  return  to  the  subject  that  evening.  If  he  had 

117 


gone  on  he  would  have  heard  from  everybody  some 
like  story  though  not  all  at  first  hand,  and  Miss 
O'Leary  would  have  told  him  what  happened  at 
the  death  of  one  of  the  MacManus  brothers,  well 
known  in  the  politics  of  Young  Ireland.  One 
brother  was  watching  by  the  bed  where  the  other 
lay  dying  and  saw  a  strange  hawk-like  bird  fly 
through  the  open  window  and  alight  upon  the 
breast  of  the  dying  man.  He  did  not  dare  to  drive  it 
away  and  it  remained  there,  as  it  seemed,  looking 
into  his  brother's  eyes  until  death  came,  and  then 
it  flew  out  of  the  window.  I  think,  though  I  am  not 
sure,  that  she  had  the  story  from  the  watcher  him- 
self. 

It  was  understood  that  Taylor's  temper  kept  him 
from  public  life,  though  he  may  have  been  the 
greatest  orator  of  his  time,  partly  because  no 
leader  would  accept  him,  and  still  more  because, 
in  the  words  of  one  of  his  Dublin  enemies,  "he  had 
never  joined  any  party  and  as  soon  as  one  joined 
him  he  seceded."  With  O'Leary  he  was  always, 
even  when  they  differed,  as  they  often  did,  gentle 
and  deferential,  but  once  only,  and  that  was  years 
afterwards,  did  I  think  that  he  was  about  to  include 
me  among  his  friends.  We  met  by  chance  in  a  Lon- 
don street  and  he  stopped  me  with  an  abrupt  move- 
ment:  "Yeats,"  he  said,  "I  have  been  thinking. 

118 


If  you  and  .  .  .  (naming  another  aversion,)  were 
born  in  a  small  Italian  principality  in  the  Middle 
Ages,  he  would  have  friends  at  court  and  you  would 
be  in  exile  with  a  price  on  your  head."  He  went  off 
without  another  word,  and  the  next  time  we  met 
he  was  no  less  offensive  than  before.  He,  im- 
prisoned in  himself,  and  not  the  always  unper- 
turbed O'Leary,  comes  before  me  as  the  tragic  figure 
of  my  youth.  The  same  passion  for  all  moral  and 
physical  splendour  that  drew  him  to  O'Leary  would 
make  him  beg  leave  to  wear,  for  some  few  days,  a 
friend's  ring  or  pin,  and  gave  him  a  heart  that  every 
pretty  woman  set  on  fire.  I  doubt  if  he  was  happy 
in  his  loves ;  for  those  his  powerful  intellect  had 
fascinated  were,  I  believe,  repelled  by  his  coarse  red 
hair,  his  gaunt  ungainly  body,  his  stiff  movements 
as  of  a  Dutch  doll,  his  badly  rolled,  shabby  um- 
brella. And  yet  with  women,  as  with  O'Leary,  he 
was  gentle,  deferential,  almost  diffident. 
A  Young  Ireland  Society  met  in  the  lecture  hall  of 
a  workman's  club  in  York  Street  with  O'Leary  for 
president,  and  there  four  or  five  university  students 
and  myself  and  occasionally  Taylor  spoke  on  Irish 
history  or  literature.  When  Taylor  spoke,  it  was  a 
great  event,  and  his  delivery  in  the  course  of  a 
speech  or  lecture  of  some  political  verse  by  Thomas 
Davis  gave  me  a  conviction  of  how  great  might  be 

119 


the  effect  of  verse  spoken  by  a  man  almost  rhythm- 
drunk  at  some  moment  of  intensity,  the  apex  of 
long  mounting  thought.  Verses  that  seemed  when 
one  saw  them  upon  the  page  flat  and  empty 
caught  from  that  voice,  whose  beauty  was  half  in 
its  harsh  strangeness,  nobility  and  style.  My  father 
had  always  read  verse  with  an  equal  intensity  and 
a  greater  subtlety,  but  this  art  was  public  and  his 
private,  and  it  is  Taylor's  voice  that  rings  in  my 
ears  and  awakens  my  longing  when  I  have  heard 
some  player  speak  lines,  "so  naturally,"  as  a 
famous  player  said  to  me,  "that  nobody  can  find 
out  that  it  is  verse  at  all."  I  made  a  good  many 
speeches,  more  I  believe  as  a  training  for  self- 
possession  than  from  desire  of  speech. 
Once  our  debates  roused  a  passion  that  came  to  the 
newspapers  and  the  streets.  There  was  an  excitable 
man  who  had  fought  for  the  Pope  against  the  Italian 
patriots  and  who  always  rode  a  white  horse  in  our 
Nationalist  processions.  He  got  on  badly  with 
O'Leary  who  had  told  him  that  "attempting  to  op- 
press others  was  a  poor  preparation  for  liberating 
your  own  country."  O'Leary  had  written  some 
letter  to  the  press  condemning  the  "  Irish -American 
Dynamite  Party"  as  it  was  called,  and  defining  the 
limits  of  "honourable  warfare."  At  the  next  meet- 
ing, the  papal  soldier  rose  in  the  middle  of  the  dis- 

120 


cussion  on  some  other  matter  and  moved  a  vote  of 
censure  on  O'Leary.  "I  myself"  he  said  "do  not 
approve  of  bombs,  but  I  do  not  think  that  any 
Irishman  should  be  discouraged."  O'Leary  ruled 
him  out  of  order.  He  refused  to  obey  and  remained 
standing.  Those  round  him  began  to  threaten.  He 
swung  the  chair  he  had  been  sitting  on  round  his 
head  and  defied  everybody.  However  he  was  seized 
from  all  sides  and  thrown  out,  and  a  special  meeting 
called  to  expel  him.  He  wrote  letters  to  the  papers 
and  addressed  a  crowd  somewhere.  "No  Young 
Ireland  Society,"  he  protested,  "could  expel  a  man 
whose  grandfather  had  been  hanged  in  1798." 
When  the  night  of  the  special  meeting  came  his 
expulsion  was  moved,  but  before  the  vote  could 
be  taken  an  excited  man  announced  that  there  was 
a  crowd  in  the  street,  that  the  papal  soldier  was 
making  a  speech,  that  in  a  moment  we  should  be 
attacked.  Three  or  four  of  us  ran  and  put  our  backs 
to  the  door  while  others  carried  on  the  debate.  It 
was  an  inner  door  with  narrow  glass  windows  at 
each  side  and  through  these  we  could  see  the  street- 
door  and  the  crowd  in  the  street.  Presently  a  man 
asked  us  through  the  crack  in  the  door  if  we  would 
as  a  favour  "leave  the  crowd  to  the  workman's  club 
upstairs."  In  a  couple  of  minutes  there  was  a  great 
noise  of  sticks  and  broken  glass,  and  after  that  our 

121 


landlord  came  to  find  out  who  was  to  pay  for  the 
hall-lamp. 

XXIX 

From  these  debates,  from  O'Leary's  conversation, 
and  from  the  Irish  books  he  lent  or  gave  me  has 
come  all  I  have  set  my  hand  to  since.  I  had  begun 
to  know  a  great  deal  about  the  Irish  poets  who  had 
written  in  English.  I  read  with  excitement  books  I 
should  find  unreadable  to-day,  and  found  romance 
in  lives  that  had  neither  wit  nor  adventure.  I  did 
not  deceive  myself,  I  knew  how  often  they  wrote  a 
cold  and  abstract  language,  and  yet  I  who  had 
never  wanted  to  see  the  houses  where  Keats  and 
Shelley  lived  would  ask  everybody  what  sort  of 
place  Inchedony  was,  because  Callanan  had  named 
after  it  a  bad  poem  in  the  manner  of  "Childe 
Harold."  Walking  home  from  a  debate,  I  remem- 
ber saying  to  some  college  student  "  Ireland  cannot 
put  from  her  the  habits  learned  from  her  old  mili- 
tary civilization  and  from  a  church  that  prays  in 
Latin.  Those  popular  poets  have  not  touched  her 
heart,  her  poetry  when  it  comes  will  be  distin- 
guished and  lonely."  O'Leary  had  once  said  to  me, 
"neither  Ireland  nor  England  knows  the  good  from 
the  bad  in  any  art,  but  Ireland  unlike  England  does 
not  hate  the  good  when  it  is  pointed  out  to  her."  I 
began  to  plot  and  scheme  how  one  might  seal  with 

122 


the  right  image  the  soft  wax  before  it  began  to 
harden.  I  had  noticed  that  Irish  Cathohcs  among 
whom  had  been  bom  so  many  poHtical  martyrs  had 
not  the  good  taste,  the  household  courtesy  and 
decency  of  the  Protestant  Ireland  I  had  known,  and 
yet  Protestant  Ireland  had  begun  to  think  of  noth- 
ing but  getting  on.  I  thought  we  might  bring  the 
halves  together  if  we  had  a  national  literature  that 
made  Ireland  beautiful  in  the  memory,  and  yet  had 
been  freed  from  provincialism  by  an  exacting  criti- 
cism, an  European  pose.  It  was  because  of  this 
dream  when  we  returned  to  London  that  I  made 
with  pastels  upon  the  ceiling  of  my  study  a  map  of 
Sligo  decorated  like  some  old  map  with  a  ship  and 
an  elaborate  compass  and  wrote,  a  little  against  the 
grain,  a  couple  of  Sligo  stories,  one  a  vague  echo  of 
"Grettir  the  Strong,"  which  my  father  had  read  to 
me  in  childhood,  and  finished  with  better  heart  my 
"Wanderings  of  Oisin,"  and  began  after  ridding  my 
style  of  romantic  colour  ''The  Countess  Cathleen." 
I  saw  that  our  people  did  not  read,  but  that  they 
listened  patiently  (how  many  long  political 
speeches  have  they  listened  to  ?)  and  saw  that  there  > 
must  be  a  theatre,  and  if  I  could  find  the  right  musi-  v 
cians,  words  set  to  music.  I  foresaw  a  great  deal 
that  we  are  doing  now,  though  never  the  appetite  of 
our  new  middle-class  for  ** realism,"  nor  the  great- 

123 


ness  of  the  opposition,  nor  the  slowness  of  the  vic- 
tory. Davis  had  done  so  much  in  the  four  years  of 
his  working  Hfe,  I  had  thought  all  needful  pamphlet- 
eering and  speech -making  could  be  run  through  at 
the  day's  end,  not  knowing  that  taste  is  so  much 
more  deeply  rooted  than  opinion  that  even  if  one 
had  school  and  newspaper  to  help,  one  could 
scarcely  stir  it  under  two  generations.  Then  too, 
bred  up  in  a  studio  where  all  things  are  discussed 
and  where  I  had  even  been  told  that  indiscretion 
and  energy  are  inseparable,  I  knew  nothing  of  the 
conservatism  or  of  the  suspicions  of  piety.  I  had 
planned  a  drama  like  that  of  Greece,  and  romances 
that  were,  it  may  be,  half  Hugo  and  half  de  la 
Motte  Fouque,  to  bring  into  the  town  the  memories 
and  visions  of  the  country  and  to  spread  every- 
where the  history  and  legends  of  mediaeval  Ireland 
and  to  fill  Ireland  once  more  with  sacred  places.  I 
even  planned  out,  and  in  some  detail,  (for  those 
mysterious  lights  and  voices  were  never  long  for- 
gotten,) another  Samothrace,  a  new  Eleusis.  I  be- 
lieved, so  great  was  my  faith,  or  so  deceptive  the 
precedent  of  Young  Ireland,  that  I  should  find 
men  of  genius  everjrwhere.  I  had  not  the  convic- 
tion, as  it  may  seem,  that  a  people  can  be  compelled 
to  write  what  one  pleases,  for  that  could  but  end  in 
rhetoric  or  in  some  educational  movement  but  be- 

124 


lieved  I  had  divined  the  soul  of  the  people  and  had 

set  my  shoes  upon  a  road  that  would  be  crowded 

presently. 

XXX 

Someone  at  the  Young  Ireland  Society  gave  me  a 
newspaper  that  I  might  read  some  article  or  letter. 
I  began  idly  reading  verses  describing  the  shore  of 
Ireland  as  seen  by  a  returning,  dying  emigrant. 
My  eyes  filled  with  tears  and  yet  I  knew  the  verses 
were  badly  written  —  vague,  abstract  words  such 
as  one  finds  in  a  newspaper.  I  looked  at  the  end  and 
saw  the  name  of  some  political  exile  who  had  died 
but  a  few  days  after  his  return  to  Ireland.  They 
had  moved  me  because  they  contained  the  actual 
thoughts  of  a  man  at  a  passionate  moment  of  life, 
and  when  I  met  my  father  I  was  full  of  the  dis- 
covery. We  should  write  out  our  own  thoughts  in 
as  nearly  as  possible  the  language  we  thought  them 
in,  as  though  in  a  letter  to  an  intimate  friend.  We 
should  not  disguise  them  in  any  way  ;  for  our  lives 
give  them  force  as  the  lives  of  people  in  plays  give 
force  to  their  words.  Personal  utterance,  which  had 
almost  ceased  in  English  literature,  could  be  as  fine 
an  escape  from  rhetoric  and  abstraction  as  drama 
itself.  My  father  was  indignant,  almost  violent, 
and  would  hear  of  nothing  but  drama.  ''Personal 
utterance  was  only  egotism."  I  knew  it  was  not, 

125 


but  as  yet  did  not  know  how  to  explain  the  differ- 
ence. I  tried  from  that  on  to  write  out  of  my  emo- 
tions exactly  as  they  came  to  me  in  life,  not  chang- 
ing them  to  make  them  more  beautiful,  and  to  rid 
my  syntax  of  all  inversions  and  my  vocabulary  of 
literary  words,  and  that  made  it  hard  to  write  at 
all.  It  meant  rejecting  the  words  or  the  construc- 
tions that  had  been  used  over  and  over  because 
they  flow  most  easily  into  rhyme  and  measure. 
Then,  too,  how  hard  it  was  to  be  sincere,  not  to 
make  the  emotion  more  beautiful  and  more  violent 
or  the  circumstance  more  romantic.  "If  I  can  be 
sincere  and  make  my  language  natural,  and  with- 
out becoming  discursive,  like  a  novelist,  and  so  in- 
discreet and  prosaic,"  I  said  to  myself,  "I  shall,  if 
good  luck  or  bad  luck  make  my  life  interesting,  be  a 
great  poet ;  for  it  will  be  no  longer  a  matter  of  liter- 
ature at  all."  Yet  when  I  re-read  those  early  poems 
which  gave  me  so  much  trouble,  I  find  little  but  ro- 
mantic convention,  unconscious  drama.  It  is  so 
many  years  before  one  can  believe  enough  in  what 
one  feels  even  to  know  what  the  feeling  is. 

XXXI 

Perhaps  a  year  before  we  returned  to  London,  a 
Catholic  friend  brought  me  to  a  spiritualistic  seance 
at  the  house  of  a  young  man  who  had  been  lately  ar- 

126 


rested  under  a  suspicion  of  Fenianism,  but  had  been 
released  for  lack  of  evidence.  He  and  his  friends 
had  been  sitting  weekly  about  a  table  in  the  hope 
of  spiritual  manifestation  and  one  had  developed 
mediumship.  A  drawer  full  of  books  had  leaped  out 
of  the  table  when  no  one  was  touching  it,  a  picture 
had  moved  upon  the  wall.  There  were  some  half 
dozen  of  us,  and  our  host  began  by  making  passes 
until  the  medium  fell  asleep  sitting  upright  in  his 
chair.  Then  the  lights  were  turned  out,  and  we  sat 
waiting  in  the  dim  light  of  a  fire.  Presently  my 
shoulders  began  to  twitch  and  my  hands.  I  could 
easily  have  stopped  them,  but  I  had  never  heard  of 
such  a  thing  and  I  was  curious.  After  a  few  minutes 
the  movement  became  violent  and  I  stopped  it.  I 
sat  motionless  for  a  while  and  then  my  whole  body 
moved  like  a  suddenly  unrolled  watch-spring,  and 
I  was  thrown  backward  on  the  wall.  I  again  stilled 
the  movement  and  sat  at  the  table.  Everybody  be- 
gan to  say  I  was  a  medium,  and  that  if  I  would  not 
resist  some  wonderful  thing  would  happen.  I  re- 
membered that  my  father  had  told  me  that  Balzac 
had  once  desired  to  take  opium  for  the  experience 
sake,  but  would  not  because  he  dreaded  the  sur- 
render of  his  will.  We  were  now  holding  each 
other's  hands  and  presently  my  right  hand  banged 
the  knuckles  of  the  woman  next  to  me  upon  the 

127 


table.  She  laughed,  and  the  medium,  speaking  for 
the  first  time,  and  with  difficulty,  out  of  his  mes- 
meric sleep,  said,  "tell  her  there  is  great  danger." 
He  stood  up  and  began  walking  round  me,  making 
movements  with  his  hands  as  though  he  were  push- 
ing something  away.  I  was  now  struggling  vainly 
with  this  force  which  compelled  me  to  movements 
I  had  not  willed,  and  my  movements  had  become 
so  violent  that  the  table  was  broken.  I  tried  to 
pray,  and  because  I  could  not  remember  a  prayer, 
repeated  in  a  loud  voice 

Of  Man's  first  disobedience  and  the  fruit 
Of  that  forbidden  tree  whose  mortal  taste 
Brought  death  into  the  world  and  all  our  woe  .  .  . 
Sing,  heavenly  muse. 

My  Catholic  friend  had  left  the  table  and  was  say- 
ing a  Pater  Noster  and  Ave  Maria  in  the  corner. 
Presently  all  became  still  and  so  dark  that  I  could 
not  see  anybody.  I  described  it  to  somebody  next 
day  as  like  going  out  of  a  noisy  political  meeting  on 
to  a  quiet  country  road.  I  said  to  myself,  "I  am 
now  in  a  trance  but  I  no  longer  have  any  desire  to 
resist."  But  when  I  turned  my  eyes  to  the  fireplace 
I  could  see  a  faint  gleam  of  light,  so  I  thought  '*no, 
I  am  not  in  a  trance."  Then  I  saw  shapes  faintly 
appearing  in  the  darkness  &  thought,  "they  are 

128 


spirits;"  but  they  were  only  the  spiritualists  and 
my  friend  at  her  prayers.  The  medium  said  in  a 
faint  voice, "  weare  through  the  bad  spirits."  I  said, 
"will  they  ever  come  again,  do  you  think  ? "  and  he 
said,  "no,  never  again,  I  think,"  and  in  my  boyish 
vanity  I  thought  it  was  I  who  had  banished  them. 
For  years  afterwards  I  would  not  go  to  a  seance  or 
turn  a  table  and  would  often  ask  myself  what  was 
that  violent  impulse  that  had  run  through  my 
nerves  ?  was  it  a  part  of  myself  —  something  always 
to  be  a  danger  perhaps  ;  or  had  it  come  from  with- 
out, as  it  seemed  ? 

XXXII 

I  had  published  my  first  book  of  poems  by  sub- 
scription, O'Leary  finding  many  subscribers,  and  a 
book  of  stories,  when  I  heard  that  my  grandmother 
was  dead  and  went  to  Sligo  for  the  funeral.  She  had 
asked  to  see  me  but  by  some  mistake  I  was  not  sent 
for.  She  had  heard  that  I  was  much  about  with  a 
beautiful,  admired  woman  and  feared  that  I  did  not 
speak  of  marriage  because  I  was  poor,  and  wanted 
to  say  to  me  "women  care  nothing  about  money." 
My  grandfather  was  dying  also  and  only  survived 
her  a  few  weeks.  I  went  to  see  him  and  wondered  at 
his  handsome  face  now  sickness  had  refined  it,  and 
noticed  that  he  foretold  the  changes  in  the  weather 
^  129 


by  indications  of  the  light  and  of  the  temperature 
that  could  not  have  told  me  anything.  As  I  sat 
there  my  old  childish  fear  returned  and  I  was  glad 
to  get  away.  I  stayed  with  my  uncle  whose  house 
was  opposite  where  my  grandfather  lived,  and  walk- 
ing home  with  him  one  day  we  met  the  doctor. 
The  doctor  said  there  was  no  hope  and  that  my 
grandfather  should  be  told,  but  my  uncle  would  not 
allow  it.  He  said  "it  would  make  a  man  mad  to 
know  he  was  dying."  In  vain  the  doctor  pleaded 
that  he  had  never  known  a  man  not  made  calmer 
by  the  knowledge.  I  Ustened  sad  and  angry,  but  my 
uncle  always  took  a  low  view  of  human  nature,  his 
very  tolerance  which  was  exceedingly  great  came 
from  his  hoping  nothing  of  anybody.  Before  he  had 
given  way  my  grandfather  lifted  up  his  arms  and 
cried  out  "there  she  is,"  and  fell  backward  dead. 
Before  he  was  dead,  old  servants  of  that  house 
where  there  had  never  been  noise  or  disorder  began 
their  small  pilferings,  and  after  his  death  there  was 
a  quarrel  over  the  disposition  of  certain  mantle- 
piece  ornaments  of  no  value. 

XXXIII 

For  some  months  now  I  have  lived  with  my  own 
youth  and  childhood,  not  always  writing  indeed  but 
thinking  of  it  almost  every  day,  and  I  am  sorrowful 

130 


and  disturbed.  It  is  not  that  I  have  accomplished 
too  few  of  my  plans,  for  I  am  not  ambitious ;  but 
when  I  think  of  all  the  books  I  have  read,  and  of  the 
wise  words  I  have  heard  spoken,  and  of  the  anxiety 
I  have  given  to  parents  and  grandparents,  and  of 
the  hopes  that  I  have  had,  all  life  weighed  in  the 
scales  of  my  own  life  seems  to  me  a  preparation  for 
something  that  never  happens. 


Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America. 

131 


14  DAY  USE 

RETURN  TO  DESK  FROM  WHICH  BORROWED 

LOAN  DEPT. 

This  book  is  due  on  the  last  date  stamped  below,  or 

on  the  date  to  which  renewed. 

Renewed  books  are  subjea  to  immediate  recall. 


1       c  1^ 


^  fiffu-eo 


Loan  Dr:p-j- 


■    ijtfi20137006 


^^i^  70  HUM 
MAY  1  9  1^19 


REG.  SIS.    ^!AY  ^  4    127 


DEC  1  7 1980     2 


LD  21A-15ot-9,'67 
(H5067sl0)476B 

LD  21A-50rn-9,'58 
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General  Library 

University  of  California 

Berkeley 


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University  of  California 
Berkeley 


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UNIVERSITY,  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 


